America is supposed to be a democracy, and people worry about whether elections are genuine or rigged. Should voting by mail be allowed? Should voters be required to show ID? In the current political climate, such questions are important, but there is an underlying premise that libertarians have good reason to question.
The premise is that America should be a democracy. You might at first wonder “What is the alternative? Are you in favor of dictatorship?” The alternative I have in mind isn’t a dictatorship. Instead, I support libertarian natural rights. Each person owns himself and his property, and all transactions people make are voluntary. No person or group of people has the right to interfere with your individual rights. Having a vote doesn’t change matters: your rights don’t depend on approval by a majority. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss several characteristically brilliant arguments against democracy advanced by our greatest libertarian theorist, Murray Rothbard. I will also talk about an argument advanced by an outstanding follower of Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
In his great book Power and Market, Rothbard points out that democracy is caught in a contradiction. Democracy is rule by the majority. All political questions are to be decided by majority vote. Can a majority vote to end democracy? If it can, democracy would no longer exist. But if it can’t, then not all political issues are decided by majority vote. Whether to retain democracy is certainly a political issue. Democracy is thus either unstable or non-existent. As Rothbard puts it:
“In the first place, suppose that the majority overwhelmingly wishes to establish a popular dictator or the rule of a single party. The people wish to surrender all decision-making into his or its hands. Does the system of democracy permit itself to be voted democratically out of existence? Whichever way the democrat answers, he is caught in an inescapable contradiction. If the majority can vote into power a dictator who will end further elections, then democracy is really ending its own existence. From then on, there is no longer democracy, although there is continuing majority consent to the dictatorial party or ruler. Democracy, in that case, becomes a transition to a nondemocratic form of government. On the other hand, if, as it is now fashionable to maintain, the majority of voters in a democracy are prohibited from doing one thing—ending the democratic elective process itself—then this is no longer democracy, because the majority of voters can no longer rule. The election process may be preserved, but how can it express that majority rule essential to democracy if the majority cannot end this process should it so desire? In short, democracy requires two conditions for its existence: majority rule over governors or policies, and periodic, equal voting. So if the majority wishes to end the voting process, democracy cannot be preserved regardless of which horn of the dilemma is chosen. The idea that the ‘majority must preserve the freedom of the minority to become the majority’ is then seen, not as a preservation of democracy, but as simply an arbitrary value judgment on the part of the political scientist (or at least it remains arbitrary until justified by some cogent ethical theory).”
Rothbard raised another point that you can’t avoid hearing about, if you keep up with news. The competing political parties will try to rig electoral districts in their favor. Rothbard shows that this is an inevitable result of a “democratic” system in which people vote for their representatives:
“According to the ‘will of the people’ theory, direct democracy—voting on each issue by all the citizens, as in New England town meetings—is the ideal political arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct democracy, so that we must settle for the less perfect ‘representative democracy’ (in olden days often called a ‘republic’), where the people select representatives to give effect to their will on political issues. Logical problems arise almost immediately. One is that different forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will often greatly alter the picture of the ‘majority will.’ If a country is divided into districts for choosing representatives, then ‘gerrymandering’ is inherent in such a division: there is no satisfactory, rational way of demarking the divisions. The party in power at the time of division, or redivision, will inevitably alter the districts to produce a systematic bias in its favor; but no other way is inherently more rational or more truly evocative of majority will.”
One of the most common arguments in favor of democracy is that it provides a way to avoid violent revolution. If the majority wants a change, it just has to wait until the next election and can then vote itself into power. Rothbard says that this argument doesn’t work either. Elections aren’t the only way to avoid violent revolution and they also generate a contradiction, if the “democratic” majority vote for a different government from the one a violent revolution would have put into power:
“Perhaps the most common and most cogent argument for democracy is not that democratic decisions will always be wise, but that the democratic process provides for peaceful change of government. The majority, so the argument runs, must support any government, regardless of form, if it is to continue existing for long; far better, then, to let the majority exercise this right peacefully and periodically than to force the majority to keep overturning the government through violent revolution. In short, ballots are hailed as substitutes for bullets. One flaw in this argument is that it completely overlooks the possibility of the nonviolent overthrow of the government by the majority through civil disobedience, i.e., peaceful refusal to obey government orders. Such a revolution would be consistent with this argument’s ultimate end of preserving peace and yet would not require democratic voting.
“There is, moreover, another flaw in the ‘peaceful-change’ argument for democracy, this one being a grave self-contradiction that has been universally overlooked. Those who have adopted this argument have simply used it to give a seal of approval to all democracies and have then moved on quickly to other matters. They have not realized that the ‘peaceful-change’ argument establishes a criterion for government before which any given democracy must pass muster. For the argument that ballots are to substitute for bullets must be taken in a precise way: that a democratic election will yield the same result as would have occurred if the majority had had to battle the minority in violent combat. In short, the argument implies that the election results are simply and precisely a substitute for a test of physical combat. Here we have a criterion for democracy: Does it really yield the results that would have been obtained through civil combat? If we find that democracy, or a certain form of democracy, leads systematically to results that are very wide of this ‘bullet-substitute’ mark, then we must either reject democracy or give up the argument.”
Hans-Hermann Hoppe raises another question about the alleged good qualities of democracy. Democratic regimes will tend to take a short-run perspective on things. They know that their time in power is limited, so they will tend to take as much as they can now, while adopting a “who cares?” attitude to what comes afterward. In his outstanding book Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe says:
“A democratic ruler can use the government apparatus to his personal advantage, but he does not own it. He cannot sell government resources and privately pocket the receipts from such sales, nor can he pass government possessions on to his personal heir. He owns the current use of government resources, but not their capital value. In distinct contrast to a king, a president will want to maximize not total government wealth (capital values and current income) but current income (regardless and at the expense of capital values). Indeed, even if he wished to act differently, he could not, for as public property, government resources are unsaleable, and without market prices economic calculation is impossible. Accordingly, it must be regarded as unavoidable that public-government ownership results in continual capital consumption. Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a king would do, a president (the government’s temporary caretaker or trustee) will use up as much of the government resources as quickly as possible, for what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume. In particular, a president (as distinct from a king) has no interest in not ruining his country. For why would he not want to increase his confiscations if the advantage of a policy of moderation-the resulting higher capital value of the government estate-cannot be reaped privately, while the advantage of the opposite policy of higher taxes-a higher current income—can be so reaped? For a president, unlike for a king, moderation offers only disadvantages.”
Let’s do everything we can to promote libertarian natural rights and to expose the fallacies of phony “democracy.”
