Thailand's rice

I read a good piece today on the web site "Diplomat" about Thailand's mess with rice and the mountain of it they obtained by trying to help the poor, which it seems in Thailand mainly means rice growers.  At least they are most of the voters.

This seems to be the problem with populist politicians in elective multi-party democracies.  Such people carry out irresponsible policies in order to gain electoral support, figuring I guess they or a later government will deal with the consequences, or (probably more likely), in their ideological framework that tends to blind them to reality, letting their hopes for doing good distort their thinking.

It's hard from my distance to tell if the Thaksins' were corrupt and profiting from all this, as is alleged, or just politicians buying votes, or truly wanting, out of what one must say seems to be unbelievable economic stupidity, to help poor farmers.

It would appear, at a minimum, that they were fast bankrupting the country, and, true to Thai tradition, the military intervened, overthrowing a duly elected government, at least by U.S. standards, ignoring what I see as vote buying and a corrupt electorate who must know such schemes are not sustainable but vote for them anyway out of self interest.  It's to my mind hard to defend the claim such a corrupt electorate is entitled to democracy.

That is of course one of the problems with multi-party democracies -- people don't vote for the best but for either their prejudices or their selfish interest, and, of course, people are good at convincing themselves that what is in their interest is in the interest of the country.