Subject: Re: The Affordability Tour Kicks Off
In the Shinyland of today, how do the clerks, that populate the administrative overhead, have agency to guarantee their employment, as they are outnumbered more than 10 to 1, by the people paying high prices, because of the administrative costs?

The same way that New York train conductors have agency to guarantee their employment, when they are outnumbered by far more than 10 to 1, by the people paying higher prices for transit:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

It's pretty simple. When a policy action will impose a very large burden/b> on a small discrete number of people, all of those people will be outraged and driven to action. Getting fired from your job, or the risk of getting fired from your job, is a really serious outcome. You will know that it happened, and you will probably know that it's likely to happen, and you will invest a lot of energy into political effort to avoid having that happen to you. That translates into a sizable number of voters who are outraged and energized and will organize to defeat and/or inflict punishment on any elected official who did this to them.

But on the other side of that, when a policy action will confer a small or moderate benefit on a very large number of people....none of that happens. Very few of them know this is even going on, or even a thing, unless or until it happens. The benefit to them will be much, much smaller than the cost to the other people - so they won't really be motivated to do anything to support elected officials who make it happen, if ever they even make a connection between the policy and the benefit (which they won't). And humans are deeply loss-avoidant - our psychology is such that we tend to highly emphasize losses relative to how much we emphasize gains.

The TL;DR - hurting a small number of people to benefit a large number of people often results in bad political outcomes, and politicians know this. Which is why those train conductors get a bill that protects their jobs, why longshoremen get political support to fight automation at ports, and why the "doc fix" got passed every single time.