The errors of democracy: Why democracies and republics devolve into tyrannies
I had the pleasure of reading this wonderful book by a great German thinker, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
In this book, Hoppe lays out why democracy based governments ultimately become unstable and collapse into tyrannies. He uses historical examples, from Ancient Greece and Rome, Nazi Germany, and more. Hoppe draws heavily from the works of the late Murray Rothbard, whom he called his “mentor and master”. Hoppe studied under Rothbard at his last job as a professor at the University of Las Vegas at Nevada.
Although he and I don’t advocate for monarchy, Hoppe goes into detail explaining why monarchies as a general trend have been more stable. (This however does play a role in arguing for private property rights, for reasons I will explain below.)
I will now elaborate on why our once limited government has devolved into an overbearing, overtaxing system. One that has waged unnecessary wars, has run up a debt in excess of $19 trillion, hyper-regulated the economy, and other crimes… All in the name of “the people”.
“Isn’t democracy (or republicanism) the best system because it represents the will of the people?”
This is the common argument made in favor of democracy, but it’s not difficult whatsoever to answer.
First off, who actually signed the Constitution?
This was a very compelling argument made to me, by the libertarian-anarchist thinker, Lysander Spooner in his work “The Constitution of No Authority”.
How much of the population living in the United States at the time actually signed the Constitution?
It was around 3%.
And where does it say that the Constitution applies to their descendants, and anyone living with them?
Shouldn’t adults be able to decide what kind of rules and political system they want to live under, not simply defer this decision to someone else?
How much of the population votes?
For the last few elections, it’s been about a third.
How many people do you know who don’t vote because they feel that it “won’t make a difference”?
Even at the time of the American Revolution, one third opposed the revolution, one third was for it, and the remaining third didn’t care either way.
“What’s wrong with ‘one man, one vote’?”
The more voters there are, the less and less each vote actually matters… especially with our electoral college system.
The northeastern states and California for example, have always been blue (Democrat) in recent times. Voting Republican there doesn’t change anything. The exact opposite is true for much of the South.
What accountability is there?
When you vote for a politician, you vote for nothing but promises. Not guaranteed results.
If a customer signs a business contract with someone, the person has to provide what was promised, or they could face legal issues. In a less formal setting, the customer could demand a refund, stop buying products from that company, or do other things that could harm them economically. All of these provide incentive to make sure that the conditions of the contract are carried out.
There are websites at present where you can look up the promises that various presidents made while running, as well as what they actually did while in office. Often times, it’s night and day.
Example: George W. Bush saying that he would pay off the national debt to “record low levels” when in fact he was the second largest spending president.
Who are the politicians really beholden to?
I think anyone with half a brain knows that there are a number of special interests that manipulate our government. Between reading and just general observation, I find that different interests support the two parties at different times. And some will even support both, just to hedge their bets.
These are just a few off the top my head:
Republicans: Military contractors, “Big Oil, Gas, and Coal”, “ Big Pharma”, police lobby groups (Yes, they exist!), big farms, Wall Street banks.
Democrats: Public Sector unions (often teacher unions), Hollywood, health insurance companies, lawyers, Wall Street banks.
The “conflict of voter interest” problem
When you look at who votes and donates, you realize that nearly everyone voting has a conflict with someone else.
A few quick examples:
- People who benefit from wars (military contractors), versus people who pay for them and/or lose loved ones from them.
- People who vote to get social program benefits, versus people who pay into but don’t receive them.
- People who want others to be taxed to fund their children’s education, versus the childless.
- Government workers who want the tax payers to pay their pensions, versus those who have no desire to pay those people.
- People who benefit from the complex tax and regulatory structure (like lawyers and tax accountants), versus those who are hurt by it. (Everyone else.)
And on and on.
Does the average person support bailouts, corporate welfare, most wars, foreign aid, and so on?
I’m more than willing to be proven wrong on this, but I doubt it.
How do we end the corruption and keep money out of politics?
I’m of the belief that it’s not possible. Political systems by their very nature draw in people that advance not based on their skill and efficiency, but rather speaking skills, charm, and sometimes good looks.
If these people were capable of being productive citizens, they would most likely be running businesses or working in science labs.. not advancing their careers based on telling people what they want to hear.
Would Obama live the kind of lifestyle he has now, if he hadn’t gone into politics?
As the great British statesman Lord Acton so famously said: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Many of the candidates are bought and paid for before they even run.. The people funding them know what they are doing.
I find that one of the failures of the Political Left, (and one of the main reasons I fell away from this belief system) is that it rests heavily upon the hope that someone better will come along, who will actually have the interest of “the people” in mind… This never seems to be the case.
Below, I will talk about some more of the problems with democracy, and some possible alternatives.
The time preference of the rulers
I didn’t think much about this until it was explained to me, but one of the trade-offs that monarchy does have over democratically elected governments, is that the leaders have a longer term view.
A democratically elected president/prime minister is thinking about what they can do to get elected for another four to eight years… Not about what effects their policies will have on the long term health of the nation.
Upon coming to power, monarchs expected to be there for another twenty, forty, or even more years. This meant of course, that they were looking down the road.
One such example of this, is that national debts under monarchies generally rose only during war times, and were paid off during peace. A monarch would borrow only what was needed to fight a war, and then pay it off once the country was at peace again.
There were even cases of monarchs being killed by members of their own family, since they were responsible for the debt if the monarch failed to paid it off. Responsible rulers were also thinking of what their children had to inherit, and didn’t want to leave them with a hopeless situation.
Due to gerrymandering and no term limits, congresspeople and senators are pretty much set for as long as they want.
(For those that don’t know, “gerrymandering” means redrawing the voting districts in order to make sure that people of a given political party are included.. and thus making sure that the person doing the gerrymandering is guaranteed votes from members of their own party.)
While it could be argued that congresspeople and senators are in for the long haul, there aren’t really consequences to what they do since they aren’t personally held liable, the way a monarch was.
The point that can be drawn from all of this is that monarchs wanted to maintain their states, in the same sense an individual wants to maintain their private property. Most people who have a house with a yard for example, want to keep it tidy for the sake of appearance, reputation, and possibly property value.
Public places such as roads, parks, bridges, and so on are dirty, polluted or broken down because they’re public property. Since they’re owned by “everyone”, nobody is really focusing on taking care of them. The former Soviet Union and modern day China are the most polluted nations in history for this reason. It was said that there were rivers in the Soviet Union so polluted, that they even caught on fire!
Politicians in a democratically elected government are in a sense, viewing the government as public property. This means that they’re not thinking about the general well being of it, but rather what they can get during their time in office.
The way government is funded vs. the way a private business earns its money
A government takes its money by force. Since there is really nothing restraining politicians (except their own supposed “goodwill), taxes can be raised virtually without limit. The government can also borrow money in our names, and then foot our descendants with the bill.
I find it funny how in school they teach us that “monopolies are bad because without competition, prices can be raised without limit and there’s no incentive to improve quality.”
Yet the government itself is a monopoly, and has done exactly that!!
Contrast this with a private business which can only get your money if it provides something that you want. If I don’t want to eat at one of the restaurants on my block, I have plethora of others that I can spend my money at. This competition is what boosts the quality of food and lowers the prices. If the business doesn’t provide what people want, it goes out of business.
The opposite is true in the public sector; governments often use failure as a justification for more funding. The money we spend on “defense” has doubled since the time of 9/11, from $300 billion to around $600 billion. The same is true of the “War on Drugs”, but drugs are as prevalent as ever.
This is a blog that explores the problems with antitrust laws, and how and why a monopoly can’t exist in the free market for those interested:
https://thepolicy.us/without-anti-trust-laws-wouldnt-we-be-at-the-mercy-of-monopolies-d067751a91e4#.sc7kdbai5
On the impossibility of “limited government”
Murray Rothbard once said “The notion that a government however limited, can stay limited is truly Utopian.”
As a former conservative/libertarian, I used to believe that we just needed a government that is confined by a limiting document such as the US Constitution. The Constitution has historically been the most ambitious attempt at restraining government power.
Despite all of this, it has failed. The reality is that the majority of what the government already does violates the Constitution.
For what consequences do the people in power face if they go against it?
The Constitution won’t grow fangs and bite you.
Various moneyed interests arise in a market economy, and will appeal to the government to maintain and expand their power and influence. They do this by lobbying, bribery, and so on.
Many of the government’s own regulatory agencies are presented as being there to “protect us”, but many of them end up becoming controlled by special interests.
Examples:
The former head of Monsanto running the FDA.
The Treasury being run by a former CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Many also don’t realize that Congress often defers the law making for particular industries to these regulatory bureaus, which write things in favor of the interests they serve. This is known as “regulatory capture”.
I talk more about these issues in here for those with any interest:
https://thepolicy.us/without-government-regulations-wouldnt-we-be-eating-poisoned-food-and-consuming-dangerous-drugs-869052306812#.21c9ksa4v
The monopoly on judicial review
One of Rothbard’s greatest insights into the weaknesses of the Constitution is the way the Supreme Court is organized.
Aside from children in Social Studies classes, nobody believes that the Supreme Court Justices are truly neutral and apolitical. They are appointed by the President, who has his own views and agenda. And of course, is beholden to various special interest groups that fund him.
The problem is that the government has a monopoly on interpreting its own powers, which is like letting a child decide what rules they want to live by. Since the Supreme Court generally rules in favor of the government what really keeps it in check? Over time, the government can essentially grant itself more and more power, until we are left with a government of unlimited powers… which is the direction we seem to have been sliding in.
The monopoly on defense
Even if a government is limited to protection and defense, what stops the government from taxing and spending what it wants on the military and police? This relates to the problem I talked about above regarding how a government collects its revenue, as opposed to the way a private business does.
Spending and borrowing can be increased as much as politicians see fit.
Police have their own lobbyist groups, which fight for more funding and equipment. This is one of the reasons the “War on Drugs” has continued, despite being an abject failure. Police forces want it to continue, in order to keep their jobs and justify their increased funding.
America went from a federal government that taxed at less than 3% of the national income, to over 40% today. And this doesn’t even get into the fact that we borrow over $1,000,000 a minute to pay for things that we can’t afford through taxation…. And on top of all of that, we’re still running a budget deficit.
The myth of “secession being treason”
Before the “Civil War”, it was commonly accepted that the United States was a voluntary union of states, which could be entered or left as desired.
(Here’s a blog I wrote about the underlying causes of the Civil War, for those interested)
https://medium.com/@AnCapSTK88/was-it-over-slavery-aaaddb1a2fb#.7je157hth
This is in the same sense a person can join a club if they’re interested, and quit when they decide that it isn’t for them.
This was in fact the Federalist (the party which wanted a strong central government) viewpoint at the founding.
This is commonly overlooked, but earlier in our history several New England states and South Carolina all tried to secede from the United States.
The mark of a true statesman is to negotiate, and only to rely on war as an absolute last resort. This was the case when the other states tried to secede before 1861.
After the “Civil War”, the overall view of the United States changed. It went from being seen as a collection of states joined together through a voluntary union, to a powerful central government which managed the states like districts. This is evident by how in older texts “United States” is referred to in the plural. For example, “the United States are going to war” whereas today we would say “the United States is going to war”.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”- The Second Amendment
A common question I often hear regarding this Second Amendment is “Where are the militias?”
States used to have their own militias before the War between the States, but it became treason to do so afterwards.
The original purpose of multiple militias was to keep the federal government in check. The idea was that if the country was invaded, the militias along with a professional army would fight off the invaders. I know that during the time of Andrew Jackson, it was even debated whether or not we should have even had a standing army.
Since the combined militias largely outnumbered the regular army, they could wipe out the army if a general tried to use it so seize power.
As stated above, states became terrified of seceding and having their own militias after the war, out of fear that they would be crushed just like the Southern Confederacy had.
The myth of the “educated voter”, and the arguments behind limiting voting rights
As I stated above in my Revolutionary War example, having a population that doesn’t care what the government does is nothing new. It goes back to the founding of the country, and most likely before then.
In this book, Professor Bryan Caplan does a scientific breakdown of why people vote, and how much of it is based on irrational reasons.
As much as I like to make jokes about this kind of stuff all the time, it’s really something how he was able to compile hard data on it!
“Why did the Founders of the country want to grant the right to vote to only rich, white men?”
The Founders had a tenuous relationship with democracy, and believed that the country needed to be protected from the “dangers” of democracy.
Initially, you could only vote if you owned property. The logic being that if you owned property and wealth, you had a stake in the well being of the nation.
The logic was that those who didn’t own property would vote to take away the property of the rich.. and we would all be poor for it.
Or the alternative would be that the system would draw in demagogues that would appeal to the masses through rhetoric, but in reality work at the behest of moneyed interests that want privileges.. which is where we are today.
This is one of the arguments are against “direct democracy”, i.e. people voting directly on the laws themselves.
“Direct democracy doesn’t work because the people aren’t well informed enough, so we need a republic.”
Well if that’s the case, what makes someone think that the people are informed enough to pick someone who will make the right decisions for them? They still have to deal with the same issues and policies.
I have seen studies of young adults being unable to explain what the Bill of Rights is, how many senators we have, how a bill becomes a law, etc.
Presidential speeches have also gone from a college age level, to high school level, and are now at a seventh grade level.
“Where do we go from here?”
Although I used to believe that we simply need a government constrained by a binding document, I realize that this isn’t possible
People are corrupted by power, and political systems draw in the most unsavory of characters.
I believe that the best arrangement would be to live under a society of private property rights and voluntary contracts. Everything should be provided the marketplace, absent of coercion.
I believe that all adult relationships and transactions should be voluntary, not done at the point of a gun.
This isn’t something that can happen overnight, but definitely a worthy goal to achieve across multiple generations.
I would say that we should at least start with ending a lot of these wars, the surveillance state, and the “War on Drugs”.. Let’s take things from there.
Hope you enjoyed this! More coming soon.
-STK
