Why You Hate Your Government: Late Capitalism a Survival Guide

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Lake Capitalism a survival guide. This is governments part one.

Actually I'll do two parts on government because such a bigish subject as it were. Now if you feel less than totally satisfied with how your government is doing wherever you happen to be congratulations you are in the vast majority of people. It turns out that democratically elected governments uh UK, US, OECD etc are very much more much less popular or more unpopular I guess than they used to be 20 30 40 years ago. And this is a global phenomenon.

This is not isolated any particular country. So it's not just you who are unhappy with your government. It's lots of people who are unhappy with their governments. And this raises a a question, right?

Why why would there be this global um move from all these disconnected theoretically disconnected countries that don't share politics or his history or any of these other elements? Why would there be this sudden development across the globe? not sudden, it's been developing over time, but this increasing uh dislike uh disgust, disgruntlement, disease as it were with one's elected officials. And part of the answer is of unsurprisingly will be congratulations, welcome to late capitalism.

And what's happened is that governments themselves has become captive to this late capitalist logic. and they don't see this and therefore they don't know how to respond to it and they don't know what to do about the fact they don't want their people to dislike them. By the way, notice this. Politicians really like to be liked.

It makes their jobs easy. They want to do popular things that make all their voters happy and then they can win elections and everybody loves them and that's great. Let's do that. Unfortunately, this is not the world that they find themselves in.

They feel like they need to do things that make a lot of people really unhappy. And the question I have and you may have and but I don't generally see this asked in this terms is why suddenly are all the decisions that politicians want to make unpopular as opposed to just ...