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This chapter establishes an analytical benchmark of a democratic system in which political outcomes reflect genuine consensus among the participants. This benchmark traces to Antonio de Viti de Marco’s construction of contrasting models of democratic action. The theory of a wholly cooperative democratic regime provides a benchmark against which to examine actual democratic processes and arrangements. In this respect, and looking ahead, de Viti recognized that democratic regimes were not passive reflectors of individual preference orderings because they entailed relationships of domination and subordination.

This chapter asks the reader to think whether an economy in its entirety is better construed as an engine or as an ecological system. By treating it as an engine, economists can pretend to be mechanics. Once an economy is recognized to be a complex ecological system, the mythology of global governance gives way to the reality of multiple sources of local governance. For democracies, there is no person who can reasonably be described as making choices for the regime. Instead, choices emerge out of processes of interaction among collections of people.

This chapter explores how public debt is a troubling practice for republican and democratic regimes because of its ability to corrupt the language and practice of political economy. For instance, the idea of contract is a perfectly good and sensible concept to apply to the private ordering of economic interaction. When that term is extended to public ordering outside the hypothetical construction of a cooperative state, it becomes a piece of ideology that obscures the role of public debt in promoting the interests of politically dominant groups within society.

This chapter explores just who it is that supplies the macro guidance that is envisioned in the various macro theories. The answer to this question is of great significance for the political economy of public debt and fiscal policy. Where the two extreme points of answer regarding this question are some macro czar as an analytical convenience and ‘the people’ as a democratic platitude, this chapter takes a Machiavellian-inspired tack whereby the few dominate the many.