Your replies seem to come from a good place, and you have some good questions, to which you wrongly presume you hold the answers (ie. you presume you have the r

Your replies seem to come from a good place, and you have some good questions, to which you wrongly presume you hold the answers (ie. you presume you have the right models of the world). Neither does anyone else in general. I cannot do justice to type the frameworks here into a chat, but just an invitation to challenge your own world views (if you indulge ) ... Do elites and their followers comes from the same strata of society and hold the same values? What is the role of intellectuals in a state? Does income really play the decisive role for them? What else besides income people cherish the most, and how is this weighted in different strata of society? In your parting remark on the libertarian "fantasy" you want to voice your emotional judgement, to which you are entitled. Im not too much into labels without functional concept. "...idiots who believe conspiracy theories". Do you know some professional (medical or academic) who believes (COVID in this context) conspiracy? I do, many in fact. I also know academics who teach PhD level physics and publish in top journals, who believe that the earth is 6000 yrs old. I can hardly consider this person idiot in a conventional sense (of cause N. Taleb would have his own view of this). [I had to skip the election part and the "..because other people bear the cost of individual decisions" part. Too long to expose and investigate this to a sufficient detail. Enough to say that we would disagree right from the premisses, however, those are minor issues, or particulars if you will, which stem from the prevalent assumption of a world view.]