Centralizing Power Centralizes The Target

... of disappointment and subsequent rage.

It's all well and good to be a socialist and hand out money when times are good. You get to consolidate power and have the luxury of telling the deplorables what pronouns they are permitted to use. When things go bad, however, you are the logical target of wrath. After all, you told everyone you were the person who could run their lives down to how many pennies they pay for gasoline.

PARIS—The worst rioting to hit the French capital in years left President Emmanuel Macron weighing an emergency crackdown on protests and scrambling to shield his pro-business agenda from surging public anger at his government.

Mr. Macron convened a crisis meeting of ministers on Sunday after protests by the gilets jaunes—or yellow vests—escalated violently the day before, leaving the Arc de Triomphe vandalized and the heart of Paris dotted with burning cars and smashed storefronts.

The gilets jaunes movement, sparked in October by Mr. Macron’s proposal to raise fuel taxes to reduce pollution, gained strength in areas outside big cities where people depend on cars. It has since broadened to a rallying cry for those who say his policies favor the wealthy and punish the working class...

It was the third consecutive weekend that gilets jaunes massed throughout the country, but the leaderless movement, which has no spokespeople or defined membership, has refused to name representatives to sit down with the government.

Emphasis mine. It was that last bit that jumped out at me. A quick solution to the crisis would be to decentralize power and hand authority for a lot of this stuff out to the provinces, cities, towns, hamlets and pigsties where the deplorables bathe in mud while Macron and his elite partners sip champagne at their global meetings where they discuss how horrid all those little people are.

Ahem. In any case, if the source of your gas price pain is the local mayor, you'd go firebomb his house and leave poor Macron alone to pose for the cameras and take softball questions from an adoring media.

Or better yet, you could take all that ham-fisted, regulatory interference in the lives of the Normals and burn it before the Normals burn you.

Nah. More money and power for the elites. That's the solution here. Nothing feedback-loopy about that.

Maybe the solution is to take all the elite leaders of the world and move them to some place the Normals can't reach. Perhaps we can construct a home for them in socialist-friendly San Francisco Bay. Like Alcatraz, maybe.