There are debt/money growth cycles, law/bureaucracy growth cycles, and periods of reset for both of them.
During the growth phase, debt accumulates, and laws build upon laws as bureaucrats become bloated and detached. Even well-meaning people in power can't fix it; every attempt to fix things just adds another layer of debt and legal complexity.
And then after a long enough time, it blows up. It could be slow or it could be fast, but it gets fucking rekt. It could be a lost war, a major internal revolution, or a slow massive decline and then a major populist democratically-elected landslide pivot.
The new government emerges, as order out of chaos, with elements of authoritarianism. The ideal scenario is that this newfound unity is enough to create change in the right direction, and then decentralize itself to re-establish rule of law and individual rights. The more common scenario, however, is that this newfound unity is not let go by those who claimed it, and it leads to authorianism/communism/fascism and decades of problems. In other words, the revolution against the decaying chaos is easy, but sticking the landing toward the re-emergence of freedom and productivity is the hard part.
That's why nothing stops this train. We're in the debt cycle rotation/reset, and eventually the bureaucratic rotation/reset as well. It takes billions of dollars to build a thousand feet of high-speed rail in the USA. Europe flails around on energy optics. Politicians become satire. Japan is stuck in yield curve control. This can last a long time, but the tailspin is nearly irrecoverable.
Incrementalism doesn't work at this phase. The event horizon is passed. Rather, the focus becomes on what order will emerge from the chaos. Is it rational order, or is it even worse than what came before?
The answer to that question, is what people have a big part in shaping.
