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Abheek Barman has an excellent piece on why even large groups can’t swing policy their way if there’s a strong lobby against it. He hones in onto a flaw in democracy (actually one of many) that is counterintuitive. One would expect the wishes of the “majority” to overcome the power of a small lobby in a democracy. But as Mancur Olson showed 40 years back in The Logic of Collective Action, the opposite is often true. The loss to a few “vested interests” is much larger than the gain each individual voter gets from a good policy.

Olson said that though users of soap, say, outnumbered producers many times, when it came to polls or lobbying, they always lost out to soap-makers. Even in democracies, where numbers are supposed to swing things.

So it’s not how many people are on your side that counts, but how much any policy change affects each guy. By that calculation, a policy switch to benefit users — lower tariffs on imported soap — will be resisted by companies whose profits would fall. But the gain to each soap user from a fall in soap prices would be tiny, whereas the loss to each soap-maker from a drop in margins would be big. So, soap-makers would gang up and lobby much harder than soap-users and they’d succeed in keeping tariffs high. People care more for things that affect them immediately, rather than broad-sweep stuff like economic policy. (from Barman)

Somehow, democracy is viewed as some sort of panacea. To me it’s a tool with limited value. It’s a way to select a government. Currently the best way. That’s it. One of the supposed side effects is that it brings about more freedom / liberty. But that’s not always true. Sauvik Chakraverti brings out the point forcefully in his reassement of Nehru.

. . . it is far more important to have a free market than it is to have the vote. The market is where economic achievements are made. I cannot open a beer bar in my basement, but I can vote. What good is that vote to me? Tribals in central India can vote, but cannot sell their lovely drink, mahua. What good is democracy without the market? Democracy without free markets is meaningless. Illiberal democracy, we Indians must now realise, is a very bad system of government.

Are we really free in India? Or have we simply substituted the skin colours of our “rulers”? Note, democracy is not equal to freedom. It’s just one of the many pieces in the jigsaw. One of the classic corruptions of democracy is “democratic socialism” — a weasel word where the socialism eats away whatever freedom democracy brings. Democracy is but an instrument, freedom and liberty the final goals.