the nature of democracy

Topics: Democracy, Theory
26 Mar 1994

From: ervan

As much as I wanted to disagree with what you were saying
this afternoon, I never quite figured out what it was. I
suppose that means I surrendered the tactical battle...

Anyway, your claim merely seems to be either:
1) There are ways to change people's opinion.
and/or
2) The are multiple ways to influence the political machine.

The second is somewhat in opposition to what I thought we
agreed on, that democracy works, in the limited sense of fairly
representing people's views, however pathetic. If democracy
'works' then input to the machine should be irrelevant unless
it acts via (1). My impression is that, to a limited extent,
lobby money buys opinions via (1) to achieve the desired
political effects.

However, that's somewhat off the point, at least as I see it.
My point is that the mechanism achieves tyranny of majority
when it's 'working'. When it 'fails', it really fails.

Let me consider two cases. First, as I already mentioned, the
illegality of drugs is a pure case. The majority has decided
to impose its morality on the minority. It matters not how
much harm is visited upon the minority nor how trivial the gain
to the majority. For that matter, the majority does not even
realize any real gain from the drug war but is so bent upon a
moral crusade (as I no longer see the 'facts' as even worth
arguing any more than it is worth arguing that the earth is
4.6G years old) as to work contrary to its own real
interest. This is truly democracy failing as paranoia feeds
press feeds voting feeds politicians feeds paranoia. Presuming
I know what I'm doing (no fraud) and I don't interfere with
someone else's equal right (no force), I grant neither the
divine right of kings nor the divine right of majorities any
control over what I do with my own body.

On a more prosaic note, consider social security. As David
Friedman said (in "The Machinery of Freedom") why would people
be so foolish as to vote to force themselves to pay a tax for a
charity that they would not of their own volition donate to?
But yet, the popular perception is that this has happened. It
has not. Social security, in fact, transfers money from the
productive but exploited to the politically connected. In this
particular case, the productive are the poor and the
politically connected are upper middle class voters. Despite a
partially progressive tax, the effect is regressive because
poor people start work sooner (and thus front end load with a
high NPV) and die sooner after retiring. Tyranny of the
majority operates on purely economic grounds here, regardless
of the rationalizations people contrive. A majority, however
slim, perceives some profit, however slight. The minority, no
matter how great their loss, loses the election. Somehow we do
not believe this happens because it does not appear on the
surface. Nonetheless, this is the effect. And, in my opinion,
it could not be otherwise in a redistributionist democracy such
as ours.

Taking a more general approach to the economic question, the
same analysis applies it almost every case. Free trade creates
wealth. If you want to trade with me (be it product, labor, or
money), and I want to trade with you. We are both better off.
Value is created. Government, on the other hand, destroys
wealth. It has two mechanisms available to it. It can either
force people to make transactions they do not want to. Or, it
can prevent them from making transactions they want to. Out of
this we expect improvement? It cannot be. The mere fact that
we cannot find mutually agreeable terms means wealth must be
destroyed if the transaction is forced. While there are many
twists and turns, some worth considering on their own merit,
this is always the bottom line. I find inflation a
particularly interesting example. The Keynesians, most
notably, convinced the intelligentsia for several decades that
inflation (and government spending) could produce wealth. It
took Milton Friedman and the monetarists to show in a rigorous
fashion that this was fantasy. In retrospect, it seems
impossible to believe that people actually thought printing
more little sheets of green paper could create wealth! And, in
fact, it destroyed it through frictional costs of changing
units, misallocation of resources, bracket creep, and
repudiation of debt (and now, Bill Clinton says we need more
inflation, but some people never learn).

This leaves the question of defense which is interesting for
several reasons. It represents a market failure because of
its true public goods nature. That is, if you pay for defense,
I'm covered and have an incentive to lie about the value that
accrues to me. Therefore, there is something to be said for
forcing me to pay. So far as I know, nothing else of
significance has this property. Second, blackmail is an
inevitable feature of the world we live in. It might be the
local mugger, gang, mafia, or government (for which there is no
difference but of scale). Surrendering to that inevitability,
we should make defense as efficient and as benign as possible.
Third, as a matter of natural rights, I have the right of self
defense. Only in this fashion can I control your behavior.
The government should have no authority but that which its
citizens have on their own. Thus, it can act in my defense but
it can no more morally steal your wealth for my pleasure than I
can burglar your home (and here I fudge the issue of whether or
not I have freely granted to the government the right to act in
my defense, but it surely has no stronger authority than that).

This does not mean that I have an alternative in mind.
Anarcho-capitalism would be the ideal state of personal
freedom, economic freedom, and would produce as much pleasure
as nature is capable of supporting. But, it does have the
nasty tendency to degenerate into government, either by
conquest or growth of protection rackets. In the face of that,
I do not propose any sea changes to representative democracy
(though some major facelifts are in order). However, I
recognize it for what it is, neither a goal nor a right, but
merely a means to an end, liberty. If better means present
themselves, I'm prepared to embrace them.

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