Why Everything That Needs to Be Fixed Remains Permanently Broken, by Charles Hugh Smith.

Any meaningful systemic reform threatens an entrenched, self-serving interest/elite which has a tremendous incentive to squash, co-opt or water down any reform that threatens their monopoly, benefits, etc. …

It’s far cheaper in cash and political capital to block something than it is to push through a reform that reduces the skims and scams of entrenched, self-serving interests.

Entrenched, self-serving elites are disconnected from the real world of the commoners; they live in protective bubbles, from you-can’t-fire-me job security to gold-plated healthcare to generous pensions to access to central bank credit lines — all of which is unavailable to the commoners wearing yellow vests. As a result, their grasp of the real problems is unrealistic, as the real-world experience of the bottom 90% is an abstraction.

Entrenched, self-serving elites are protected from the disastrous consequences of their policies and self-serving greed. In Taleb’s terminology, they have no skin in the game: policies can be complete failures but nobody’s fired, and nobody’s pay is cut.