Democracy Has a Customer-Service Problem (Junk fees)

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Thought this was a good read on how well our government does (or doesn't work) and how reigning in capitalism fights authoritarianism.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/democracy-hold-customer-service-airline-insurance-junk-fees/673201/

Democracy’s ideal is built on a foundation of accountability. In the past, many, if not most, of the decisions that mattered to our lives were taken by people and businesses that felt close to us. That’s not the case anymore. Now all roads seem to lead to bad hold music.



Whenever we encounter a problem we didn’t create—like my outrageous electricity charge, or vacations ruined by an incompetent airline, or hospital-billing errors, or a mix-up at the IRS—all we can really do is go online for a customer-service number and cross our fingers that, by some miracle, the call won’t consume the entire day, or worse. When a person coping with cancer treatment spends hours on the phone with her insurance company or Medicaid, she may wonder why her society is so cruel, or so incompetent, or both. And she may start to see the appeal of a demagogue who promises to deliver simple solutions: the “I alone can fix it” candidate.
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Not for nothing, authoritarian populist messages usually take aim at a faraway, unresponsive, and faceless elite. For much of the population, that is the experience of power. Granted, authoritarian governments are objectively far worse at helping citizens deal with routine problems. Good luck trying to complain to the Chinese Communist Party or to the Kremlin. But for democracy to be saved from proto-authoritarian political movements, such as Trumpism, democracy can’t be viewed, as Winston Churchill put it, as only “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” People in power need to proactively make the case for democracy through good governance at the level of everyday life.



That’s why President Joe Biden’s recent focus in the State of the Union address on “junk fees” was wise. This kind of policy sends a much-needed message: You should have democracy’s back, because it has yours. Routine dysfunction matters. Companies that engage in predatory billing, like the power company that wrongly charged me 1,400 pounds, should face serious fines. Corporations that steal your time through their own mistakes should be forced to compensate you for that time. Similarly, regulators should ensure that it is as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for it.