The $9 Latte’s Threat To DemocracyInflation and financial instability represent a clear and present danger to self-government.
By James Jeffrey
March 17, 2022
The dreaded $9 latte caught me out the other day in a café in Austin. I’d offered to get the person I was meeting a coffee. I hadn’t expected to have to hand over a $10 bill to cover it.
Lately there have been too many can-I-really-afford-this moments. And it’s not as if I live the high life as a freelance journalist. Having been locked out of the U.S. due to the pandemic travel ban, the surge in prices gave me a good slap around the face when I returned last October. Of course, it’s only gotten worse.
“Get a proper job and stop whining,” is one response. But rising costs and inflation rates hitting a 31-year high represent a real danger to self-government.
“No people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern itself democratically,” Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World Revisited. Revisited was his 1958 examination of the prophecies made in his 1932 dystopian novel about a scientific dictatorship manipulating a supine population, Brave New World. “Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene ever more frequently and drastically in the affairs of its subjects.”
Everyone got a taste of this during Covid-19, when governments rolled out furlough and various financial buttresses for employers and employees. Even before all this, the idea of a universal basic income (UBI) was already gaining traction. It got a huge boost from the pandemic. Many people lapped up being on Covid-19 unemployment benefits—of course they did, given the U.S.’s brutal employment environment.
Pre-pandemic, I’d read about UBI and could see the logic; it seemed an interesting idea at least worth exploring, especially for those in need. Now I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole after seeing how acquiescent swathes of society became when fed a mix of governmental financial support, online grocery deliveries, and a steady soma-esque drip-feed of Netflix and OnlyFans to keep them contentedly distracted while working at home.
Most people are still in denial about how easily we turned our backs on self-government during the pandemic, which has left our democracies far more vulnerable to further pressures, such as inflation. The U.K. has started grappling with that conversation, far better than most countries. If the current warped economic order sustaining the likes of escalating rental and real estate costs and second-hand cars selling as luxury items continues or gets worse, more people are going to be priced out of living an independent (and meaningful) life.
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-9-lattes-threat-to-democracy/
