Reconciling Democracy and Hoppe

Scott Adams, in the introduction to his Dilbert book When Did Ignorance Become A Point of View? outlines a political system that brilliantly combines democratic means with Hoppean ends:

… our current system of world government involves giving the leaders of all the major countries access to buttons that can launch missiles and vaporize unsuspecting citizens. I think a better system would be if every world leader had to walk around with a sack of explosives on his back and every citizen had access to a wristwatch button that would detonate it. My concept has many benefits beyond the obvious entertainment factor and the reduced risk of being vaporized by an incoming missile. For one thing, there would no longer be any such thing as a “slow news day”. And the boring pack of lies called the State of the Union speech would last about thirty seconds. I have to think taxes would be abolished altogether. We wouldn’t need all the tax money anyway: The military would be unnecessary and the economic stimulus from eliminating taxes would make all the poor people incredibly wealthy, or so I’ve been told. And if we needed a highway or dam built, we could give our president a trowel and then place one finger menacingly over the wristwatch button and say, “Start working, Goober.” I realize that my concept would degrade the prestige of the presidency, but I don’t think that prestige was doing me any good anyway.

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11:32 pm on May 30, 2004