Z for impedance or Z for Zener?
Last week I accidentally made an analogy between electrical and political power, in the context of Poland's phase switching. Let's see if I can stretch the analogy past its breaking point....

We can treat various types of responses to government power as types of impedance.

What government wants, of course, is zero impedance. Perfect connection with no loss or backwash. Orders go out, populace obeys instantly and perfectly.

This rarely happens, and it takes ruthless redesign and pruning of the load circuits to assure it. In the modern world only North Korea has zero output impedance and a perfectly linear 1:1 transfer function.

In more ordinary countries the impedance is mainly resistive. Enforcement officers and spy satellites and informer networks and sting operations and Delta Forces use lots of energy, but if you keep them running a normal populace will obey quickly with 80-90% efficiency.

Deliberate impedance by the load can take two forms:

Inductive reactance is a lagging response, as in union go-slow or Blue-Flu responses. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

Capacitive reactance is an immediate over-willing hyperliteral leading response, as in the classic 'sergeant-breaker' technique. Sir Yessir! Sir We'll do it your way Sir! Sir In fact we've already done it your way Sir!


But of course human loads are not passive. Each human has his own 'command source' with its own frequencies and amplitudes. He can decide to create voltages that run counterphase with the government's command voltage, to zero out the net current between the two poles. (Such as the Amish insistence on total self-sufficiency, eliminating flow between gov't and people without eliminating the connection.) Or he can create voltages that run strongly in-phase with the government, to maximize the current and burn out the wires. (Everyone would decide to sign up for Obamacare on October 1. A nicely literal example, involving actual electricity as well as government idiocy!)

And finally, the mere fact that I've been treating the circuits in terms of direct power transfer shows how far we've fallen from the proper relationship between these two sides.

Before the invention of the welfare state, the national government was not a source of current for its own population. It was meant to exert power toward foreign governments to preserve the integrity of the organism, but it was only meant to provide a reference voltage to its own population. It provided guidance in matters like contracts and currency standards and weights and measures, and it extracted a small amount of power in the form of taxes to maintain its external operations. Smaller internal governments (eg town corporations or plantations or fiefdoms) would read the reference voltage at their [literal] gates, and would respond accordingly.
  ¶ 5:12 PM