This is the second installment of a series on the game theory of democracy. Part I establishes the logic, dominant strategies, and tradeoffs of democracies over time. Part II takes the concepts in Part I and reviews their empirical manifestations and real-life strategic applications. And Part III examines the geopolitical impacts of democratic timelines and its decision making.
Part II: Gain Dependents, Gain Power
This essay is part of Applied Biofoundationalism. All chapters are linked at the end. Enjoy.
Prelude
When you're dependent on someone, they wield power over you. The more dependents you have, the more power and influence you have. Dependents do what you say and are more loyal, because they have no other choice. When a child depends on its mother, the dynamic is healthy; when an adult depends on the state, it’s corrosive and ripe for exploitation. It turns an adult into a child, and the state into a parent.
Understood this way, the dominant strategy in wealthy democracies isn’t gaining support for your cool ideas based on The Issue Of The Day; it’s gaining dependents who cannot defect. Loyal soldiers at the ballot box who won’t vote against the hand that feeds them. Viewing democracy through game theory rather than political analysis reveals how and why policies and Overton Windows drift as they do.
If every vote counts the same and you’re campaigning in a prosperous country, what’s a winning political product? Should it trend towards “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” or inch towards “you see all this wealth, if you vote for me, I’ll send some your way”? What’s the best way to foster allegiance and loyalty?
The answer to this isn’t a mystery, it’s been playing out empirically over decades. The game theory of democracies creates a structural political lurk leftwards in electoral iterated games. The best way to win a kinetic war is coordination; the best way to win a political war is coordination. An excellent way to instill coordination among millions of people is incentives. The kind of incentives that once you get them, you can’t do without.
“Conservative” or “liberal” governments become a distinction without a difference when you zoom out over 10-year+ timelines in wealthy democracies. It doesn’t matter who’s elected, the machine keeps steadily engorging itself and lurching in one direction. Because state dependents keep growing, because it’s demonstrably a winning formula to cultivate children dependents in wealthy democracies.
You simply buy votes, because you can, because it works. Swims left.
A Political Product Must Be Sold; Who’s Buying It?
In any population, agency follows a power law distribution: observable across every domain where human capability is measured.
You’re not thinking ten or twenty years from now about the long-term health of your nation, that adult stuff doesn’t win elections. You’re thinking: what gets me into office today? We’re in the realm of high-time-preference sales pitches.
The high-agency constitute, at most, 20% of your electorate. The low-agency: 80%. The Pareto Distribution is an iron law, not a suggestion. You need 51% to win. The mathematics alone dictate your strategy. If your nation is rich — with the ability to issue debt and extract from the productive to sell your political product — what’s the dominant strategy?
Government transfer payments have quadrupled since 1990. Swims left.
Handouts. Inexorable government growth. A leftward saunter of the Overton Window of entitlements. This is what it looks like. This is how a Machine generates dependents. This is, sadly, what a series of successful (and myopic) political platforms manifests as.
You know why libertarian ideas don’t sell? People aren’t buying them. Libertarian ideas fail not because they’re poorly marketed, but because there’s not nearly a big enough market for them. They speak to the 20%, and elections are won among the 80%. The underclass doesn’t want your bootstraps.
Everything gradually trends toward policies of low-agency appeasement, because as you expand your base of dependents voters, you gain power. The Overton Window creeps accordingly.
Redirected wealth is not done to generate economic returns, but political ones.
Pitch Me
The high-agency seek a singular promise: absence. Lower taxes, reduced regulation, governmental restraint. Please go away. To them, less is more. Only once you accrue capital, do you have the luxury of redistributing it.
These are the policies of ascending nations, those working toward achieving wealth.
Pitch: “We’ll leave you alone”
The low-agency ask a simpler question: what’s in it for me? Their vote flows to whomever promises the most: expanded welfare, multiplied subsidies, cascading transfer payments. More is more. The transaction is naked, and nakedness is no impediment to victory. Their vote goes to the highest bidder, there’s far more of them, and every vote counts the same.
These are the policies of descending nations, those trying to redistribute wealth they already have.
Pitch: “We’ll give you things”
This is not a flaw in the system, it is the system, operating as designed. One person, one vote, regardless of contribution, regardless of foresight, regardless of skin in the game.
Who do you structure your product for? How do the real-life trends stack up against this theory?
Per-capita transfer income has expanded 3x faster than other income over the last 50 years. Swims Left.
The Left advances by creating dependents, buying voter allegiance. “We’ll give you things”.
The Right must compete by selling a variation of the same product, but a little less so (they’re conservative, after all). The conservative product of “We’ll leave you alone” does not sell against a backdrop of prosperity, so the message becomes “We’ll give you things too, but not as much”.
We'll give you things > We'll leave you alone
Your political choice, then, is not between competing visions but between velocities: either fast liberalism, or liberalism going the speed limit. Conservatism is liberalism driving in a small town; liberalism is liberalism on the Autobahn.
The transfer payments tell the tale. The bloated fiscal budget will never be brought to heel out of ‘principled political beliefs’, but when it ceases to be a viable strategy to keep doing so. You don’t win on reducing handouts until you physically can’t anymore; the 80% do not vote for “I’d like some less, please”.
For the same reason a star cannot grow forever, those transfer payments do have a ceiling
The inexorable nature of this problem is clear, and it’s simple when you strip it down to its constituent parts. We deceive ourselves that these are complex McKinsey-consultant Excel-sheet-style problems, when they’re simply terminally corrupted incentives for both politician and populace. The flaws are structural; the distal cause is democracy and its selection effects.
Selling Magic
Price controls and rent ceilings are not economic illiteracy, they are unfortunate strategic byproducts. They make perfect sense when you understand democracy’s perverse incentive structures, which weigh the ballot of the indigent identically to the industrious.
Political products are sold not on factual merit but on moral resonance. Fact-checking is the province of the already-unconvinced, which is to say, the electorally irrelevant.
People want to know if the stance feels right. Does it cloak acquisition in the language of righteousness? If both answers are yes, you’ve got a great low-agency political product!
Price controls sell fairness: they subsidize the 80% by confiscating potential earnings from the 20%. This is not economic policy; it is wealth transfer dressed in the vestments of justice. And it wins. Empirically. Strategically. Economically? Ha, don’t be naive.
Those who approach this as an economic question find themselves befuddled by the persistence of such policies. They protest — “This never works, look at my studies!” — and fail to recognize that economic efficiency is not the operative standard. You don’t convince anyone to change moral stances with nuanced charts.
Also, what do you mean by “works”? Works… for who?
That’s how you get stuff like this, and you keep getting it, even when it “makes things worse”. Makes things worse, for who…?
This isn’t wild at all. It’s completely rational when you understand the game being played on its real terms, not how it’s nominally presented.
How to determine if a policy “works”
The question of whether a policy ‘works’ is meaningless without first establishing: works for who? On one plane of analysis, price controls are catastrophic failures; on another, they are instruments of electoral permanence.
Say you’re a politician who pitched price controls: you appealed to a moral stance. You invoked fairness. You purchase loyalty with others’ capital. You win. Uh oh, you created a problem, because price controls don’t actually work (no shit).
Your solution to the problem you created? Sell the same product, again! “Those fat cats got greedy and thwarted it, so we need more of the morally just thing I did”. The failure becomes evidence not of flawed theory but of insufficient commitment. You are re-elected to solve the crisis you authored. Real price controls have never been tried!
A formula for state expansion and winning elections in affluent democracies:
Provide morally appealing magic solution to real problem → create bigger problem → claim the solution to the bigger problem is more magic → get re-elected promising more magic → repeat.
School House Rock depictions of democracy obfuscate the game-theoretic reality of its competitive algorithm. Each iteration expands the state, deepens dependency, and entrenches the political actor who promises the next fix.
Manifestly silly economic solutions are routinely promoted during elections. Keep in mind you’re not selling your ideas because they're any good, you’re trying to win iterated games by cultivating dependents.
To do this effectively, you appeal to moral beliefs in service of political platforms that functionally say: “You deserve more than you have, and I will give it to you”. That’s a compelling message for your political product! “Yes please, I’d like some more, and this guy says he’ll give it to me!”. This sells quite well to voters.
What’s the conservative product? “You’ll get less, but that’s actually good for you. Also don’t you care about a balanced fiscal budget?” Ew! Do not want!
Below, JD has brought facts to a political fight, which is kinda like bringing a water balloon to a gunfight. You think the lowest-common-denominator voter will fact-check this and change their mind because of its factuality, JD? They vote on vibes and what you can provide them.
That’s how politicians understand if a policy “works”: does it keep getting me elected? If it gets me elected, it works great.
Don’t analyze if the policy ‘works’ as in “will it produce a good outcome?”. Analyze it from the lens of “will it recruit new voters and please my constituency?”; through this lens, yes, price controls ‘work’. This isn’t an economics discussion; it’s a moral-framing and “what can you do for me” one.
These stances aren’t confusing when you understand the game being played.
Conservatism That Conserves Nothing
There’s no hedonism in poverty, and no discipline in decadence.
Selling conservatism in prosperity is like trying to grow sunflowers in winter; the environment just isn’t designed for it.
The US spends ~$6.2 trillion per year, and takes in ~$4.4 trillion; this is the low-agency dominant strategy, in chart form. You know what passing a tax cut does? It just makes the deficit larger, because politicians don’t win by campaigning to take away those sweet, sweet transfer payments.
That’s the “conservative” solution: issue more debt so we can “conservatively” cut taxes and do nothing about spending. Because it’s electoral suicide otherwise. Pure high-time-preference corn syrup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
It’s a running joke that conservatives conserve nothing, and it’s true, because they can’t, because they’d lose if they did!
That conservatives conserve nothing is not hypocrisy but inevitability. To actually conserve — to shrink the state, to withdraw benefits — is to commit electoral suicide. They cannot win by doing what they claim to believe. Conservatism is, at its essence, an appeal to duty, responsibility, and delayed gratification: precisely the virtues that prosperity renders dramatically less appealing. This moral messaging is increasingly abandoned as comforts accrue. Luxury conditions beget luxury beliefs, and luxury solutions follow suit.
This is why when conservatives are “in power”, the state does not shrink. Ask yourself seriously why. Not in a superficial way where the conclusion is “they’re all corrupt I tell ya!”, seriously reflect why it’s nearly impossible for anyone to implement conservative rollbacks over substantive timelines in the decadent West. We’re talking 10-year periods and longer, not short-term culture war skirmishes that oscillate on shorter timelines.
People don’t do responsible things because they want to, but because they have to. When life is comfortable, responsibility doesn’t sell. When life loses that comfort, discipline has its day.
Reagan won 49 states in 1984, Brexit was cool, and look how that’s worked out for the UK. Conservatism has waves of blowback-style energy over shorter timelines, but things revert to the leftward trend so long as comfort remains. It is very much a matter of what you must do, and what you may do.
Democracy’s Endgame
When the vote of the indolent carries identical weight to the industrious, when simple majority suffices regardless of contribution, you have not merely a flawed system but a self-terminating one. You have corrosive incentives to engage in a voter bidding war. Moral hazard, but it’s the people’s moral hazard!
Ascending nations empower their agentic minorities: “We’ll leave you alone”.
Descending nations auction their accumulated wealth to their dependent majorities: “We’ll give you things”.
The former builds; the latter liquidates. The transition from one to the other is democracy’s inevitable arc.
The industrious, the entrepreneurial, the high-agency: they are numerically insufficient. You cannot win elections among the 20%. The less-productive, eagerly dependent 80% don’t desire your low-time-preference solutions. What do you do as a politician?
The democratic dominant strategy is abundantly clear: gain dependents, gain power. Spend lavishly. Purchase loyalty. Democracies don’t collapse from external pressure, they liquidate themselves, vote by vote, transfer payment by transfer payment. The Machine expands until the well runs dry, and then the real politics begins.
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Biofoundationalism chapters:
Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization
Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence & Factual Sediment
Biofoundationalism IV: Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To
Yes, as a party they are irrelevant. My reference to libertarians are regarding morality and policy stances that fundamentally orient around the liberty/oppression plane, which many conservatives do emphasize.
once you start to distill democracies to what they actually are — machines to service the lowest common denominator, you realize a high agency (libertarian) society is a false hope. this is why monarchies are cool, to some extent. you only need 1 dude to understand what “works,” and not in the sense of expanding your constituency (there is none!)