12.14.08Against Democracy
Introduction
Democracy is universally held up as the sacred political ideal. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that democracy is a secular religion. Observe: We fight wars for it (“Making the world safe for democracy”). We are implored to blindly participate in it (“It doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote”). And most tellingly, it is taboo to question it. Anyone who claims that democracy is bad is likely to be labeled a Nazi. (Even though Hitler was democratically elected and much of Nazism was promoted with democratic rhetoric.)
Nevertheless, I will attempt to prove that democracy is one of the worst political ideologies, on par with dictatorship and communism. My argument is three pronged. First, democracy is founded on initiatory violence. It is thus no more acceptable than murder or rape. Second, it can be refuted by a reductio ad absurdum; namely, that while we accept democracy for government, we would never accept it applied consistently in our lives. Third, democracy is unnecessary. What is there to vote on? All essential functions of society can be provided voluntarily and competitively on the market. Programs like the minimum wage and rent control are actually counter-productive, and can be eliminated altogether. There are many other problems with democracy: its ineffectiveness, its corruption, its total war, and its decivilization effect; but I will not address these here (see Hoppe). Last, I will address two strategies to undermine and weaken democracy: not voting and secession.
Democracy is immoral
Let us start with a definition. The root word definition of democracy gives us “demos” = “people” and “cracy” = “rule”. Essentially, democracy means rule by the people, or more commonly, rule by majority.
With this definition we can come to my first point. Democracy is a rule by majority over a minority. This means that the majority must threaten or initiate violence against the minority in order to rule. Aggression, invasion, and hegemony are at the very root of democracy.
Assume the majority wishes to levy a tax while the minority dissents. The majority must initiate coercion or threaten punishment against the minority to enforce payment. They are literally robbing the minority of private property. If the minority were not compelled to pay, it would not be a democracy. In other words, democracy could only be voluntarily if all decisions were unanimous. But, then it would cease to be majority rule. So, the inescapable problem of democracy is that it replaces voluntary interaction with initiatory coercion.
Moreover, democracy relies on a prohibition of secession. A democracy must initiate violence against seceding minorities in order to maintain majority rule. “If every dissident minority secedes after every opposed decision, then there is no democratic regime.” Thus, “those who advocate democracy are also logically advocating, that at some point secession be suppressed. And almost inevitably, that implies the use of force – military force. You can not be a democrat unless you are prepared to kill.” (source) Democracy, as it must initiate violence against minorities and secessionists, is the moral equivalent of a fascist dictatorship. Democracy is a lynch mob writ large.
One may object that democracy is not pure majority rule, but involves some individual rights. However, this does not obtain. For if some individual rights are respected, the logical conclusion is that all rights are respected, in which case democracy would not exist. The majority could not initiate violence against the minority, or violently suppress secession movements. Such acts would be rights violations. The other logical conclusion is that all rights are actually just privileges granted by the majority, and are subject to the majority’s whim, in which case we have democracy. There can be no justification for holding an inconsistent middle ground.
Democracy is absurd
My second argument is a reductio ad absurdum. Democracy, as rule by majority, does not recognize individual rights. All property is subject to the will of the majority. But why settle for majority rule only in roads, police, courts, schools, libraries, regulations, etc.? If it is right and just for a majority to rule over a minority, why not apply this principle consistently and take it to its logical conclusion: if democracy applies to 1,000,000 people ruling over 10,000; then it must also apply to any scenario where two people rule over one.
Walter Block provides one such example: Two robbers break into your house and steal your TV. You catch them, but as philosophical robbers, they point out that they are two and you are only one. As a majority following democratic principles, the robbers can rightly take your TV. Or imagine a single mother living with her three children. When she refuses to feed them ice cream for breakfast, the children, as a majority, could legitimately vote her out of the house. Or imagine a democratic organ clinic. A group of renegade surgeons could grab any person walking alone down the street, and as a majority, harvest the pedestrian’s organs. The democratic principle means that any minority must always submit to the rule of any majority.
The ultimate result of democracy carried to its logical conclusion reads like a dystopian nightmare: people would roam the streets in packs, mugging and looting any minority they could find. People would never leave their house alone, for fear of encountering any group of more than two people. Humanity would regress to some bizarre tribal warfare, where mobs would squabble desperately over who is more numerous. The larger mob—the majority—would then pillage and rob the smaller—the minority. In fact, there could not even be laws, because law could be determined at random by any majority, such as Block’s TV robbers. Such a scenario is truly absurd.
Democracy is unnecessary
My last argument is that democracy is totally unnecessary. There is no conceivable reason to have a democratic government, because any government function can be provided voluntarily and competitively on the market. Because interactions on the market are always voluntary, we can avoid the moral problem inherent in democracy of using initiatory violence against innocent people. Through market competition, these services will be more efficient, because entrepreneurs must earn their income from customers and must compete with one another to provide the best service. Moreover, instead of investing power in a centralized government, the market decentralizes power into the hands of individuals. Rather than having some bureaucrat in Washington running everyone’s lives, the free market allows people to be responsible, self-reliant adults.
Abraham Lincoln wrote that
A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” (emphasis added)
However, Lincoln was wrong. Unanimity is possible. A totally voluntary society is possible where all government functions are provided on the market. A society by consensus replaces the coercive relations of majority rule with mutual, voluntary, market relations. Lincoln’s division between democracy and anarchy/despotism is a false dichotomy. Unanimous rule is possible.
Thus, private roads would be run by profit seeking road companies, eager to satisfy customers. (Note that, historically, the first roads were privately owned.) They might collect payment from tolls, monthly subscriptions, or use road sensors that detect magnetically encoded stickers on your car. They might offer free service for commercial districts, or charge forbidding prices to through-traffic on residential streets. They could reduce road congestion through peak load pricing: charging high prices during rush hour and lower prices any other time, thus evening out the traffic flow. Importantly, road deaths would incur costs to road owners, both in repairs and reputation, in turn creating a financial incentive to provide safe, orderly roads. In comparison, democratic government roads are chaotic, ill maintained death traps: over 40,000 people die each year on roads in the U.S. alone.
So, there is no need to vote for politicians to provide roads, because the market can do a better job, and voluntarily to boot.
Private courts and police would likely be provided by insurance companies. As every exchange is a contract, people will buy contract insurance to resolve potential disputes. The insurance companies would have to indemnify victims, and would thus have a financial incentive to provide fair and efficient arbitration services. Insurance companies would stipulate in their contracts exactly how disputes would be resolved, leaving no problem of having to agree on an arbitrator after the fact. Competition would weed out corrupt companies and serve to keep premiums low.
In terms of police, note that protection from coercion is an economic good. Like contract insurance, people would buy protection insurance. Again, insurance companies must indemnify victims, and so have a financial incentive to eliminate crime. They would also stipulate in their contracts how justice would be meted out – mainly by restitution to the victim – and competition would keep them honest. Protection could also be provided by private property owners. For example, roads, malls, and office buildings can better serve customers by employing security guards, as is the case now.
Contrast government police and courts. Police are notorious for not preventing crime, and are increasingly becoming criminals themselves (e.g. taser murders). Government courts, as a monopoly industry, are bureaucratic, inefficient, and agonizingly slow. Government provision of justice is actually government perversion of justice.
There is no need to vote on police and courts, because they can be provided non-coercively on the market.
Lastly, there is no need to vote on such price control programs as the minimum wage or rent control, because they simply do not work. In fact, they are actually counter-productive: instead of helping, they hurt the poor.
For instance, the minimum wage coercively increases the price of labor, thus decreasing the income of employers. With increased labor costs, employers must demand less workers, and do so by laying off marginal workers and creating less new jobs. The minimum wage is an unemployment law. It hurts poor, marginal workers the most.
Likewise with rent control. By coercively lowering the price of housing, the incomes of landlords are reduced. With less income, landlords cannot afford to maintain their current supply of housing, and so will reduce the supply and/or reduce the quality. The effect is double: reducing the supply causes a shortage, and reducing the quality leads to widespread slum housing. Rent control is the primary cause of slums. Again, it is poor and marginal tenants who are hurt the most. Rent control is a homelessness law.
There is no need to vote on price controls, because they do not even work.
Strategy
But if democracy is morally revolting, illogical, and destructive, we are still presented with the fact that most countries are democratic, or at least subscribe to its rhetoric. Keeping in mind our goal of a totally voluntary, unanimous society, how can we delegitimize and expose democracy as the fraud it is?
The first step is to stop voting. The politicians’ credibility and legitimacy depend on the support of the masses. As de la Boétie and Hume have shown, the government rests, not on force, but on the public opinion of the citizenry. By abstaining from voting, we can lower voter turnout to the point where the winning government is supported by only a small minority, say 20% of the population. For example, if total voter turnout is 45%, and the election is very close, say 23% to 22%, that means that only 23% of the population is running the country. Suddenly people realize that democracy no longer means majority rule; it is now minority rule. Moreover, why do politicians beg us to vote, telling us “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote”? The answer is that politicians feel very nervous without mass public support. Knowing that only a small minority supports them, they must be very moderate with their policies lest the people revolt. Thus, not voting is a strong way to destabilize and threaten democracy.
Next, it is essential to realize that any internal governmental reform is near impossible. The politicians and bureaucrats are enjoying their position as leaders of a protection racket, and are not going to give it up voluntarily. Governmental reform is akin to trying to infiltrate and bring down the Mafia from the inside—it’s not going to happen.
Thus, our second strategy is secession. “Democracy relies on a prohibition of secession. A democratic regime assumes a ‘demos’—a unit of political decision-making which is constant between decisions. If every dissident minority secedes after every opposed decision, then there is no democratic regime.” (source) In other words, “secession allows the democratic process to be circumvented or evaded, without a direct attack on the government. In a secession, the existing government is not overthrown, the nation is not colonized, the people are not murdered or enslaved.” (source) Peaceful secession is a nonviolent expression of the right to free association.
Secession is like punching democracy in the gut. Secession subverts and undermines the democratic process. The integrity of majority rule is violated when a minority threatens to secede rather than obey majority decisions. As Abraham Lincoln wrote: “The principle [of secession] itself is one of disintegration, and upon which no government can possibly endure”. Further, once the legitimacy of secession is granted, it opens up a Pandora’s Box of secessionist claims that cannot be rejected. Secession would have an exponential, snowball effect: Once Vermont secedes, Quebec’s secession will progress more smoothly, New York will become a free independent city, and on and on! This is why governments fear secession so much: once it starts, it can’t stop. Once one secession is granted, entire nation-states will crumble apart. Finally, the principle of secession must lead to secession of the individual, at which point the ideal of the totally voluntary society has been reached.
Conclusion
I have attempted to show that democracy is undeserving of its status as the ultimate political structure. Democracy is based on aggression, not voluntarism, and thus is morally repulsive. Taken to its logical conclusion, democracy leads to absurdity. No rational person would accept democracy if it was applied to every aspect of their lives. Finally, democracy is wholly unnecessary – there is nothing that needs to be voted on. Further, our strategy to smash the sacred cow of democracy must be rooted in nonaggression. If we aggress or initiate violence we are no better than the democrats. Not voting and secession allow us to maintain the moral high ground, while effectively challenging the moronic democratic philosophy. And so, democracy is immoral, irrational, and unnecessary. It should be torn down from its revered pedestal and tossed onto the intellectual junk pile of history.
Great article, well written imo
Interesting article! Very entertaining read! =)
Good to know there are thinking, principled people out there. I have questions about some of these proposals but overall I like the article.
I just skipped down to your strategy and conclusion. I agree that non-voting and secession are good strategies that would get us to where we want to be. Unfortunately, as you noted, democracy prohibits secession, so if we attempted that strategy, we’d be faced with the violence of the State. And non-voting is not really an “action” but an “inaction.” Although non-voting is important, it is too slow (with all the get-out-the-vote propaganda that goes around) to rapidly effect change in society. Anarchists need to peacefully “do something” to bring people to the point where they are realize that anarchism could actually work. Violence isn’t the answer as that would alienate the populace from the principle trying to be taught. A peaceful solution would be one that people would gravitate towards and also as they used it, would be self-educated in the anarchic principle of self-government. In my opinion, the present economic climate is the perfect window of opportunity for anarchists to get their message across, as people are beginning to get really upset by the corruption found in government. I have presented an anarchic economic solution to take advantage of this ideal time we are living in, but we need more anarchists or libertarians who also take action and present other peaceful solutions that will rapidly change society. Once society reaches the point where it will allow peaceful secession, I agree that the principle of secession would be all that would be necessary to do the rest. But until that happens, other peaceful means must be used to bring us to that point.
I agree that other strategies are necessary. Non-voting and secession are just two that specifically counteract democracy.
When I use the word “democracy”, I am using it literally. You do not vote “for” someone under democracy. What the author is making points against is a “republic”. Specifically the US version of republic (no one else has ever fought wars to “make the world safe for democracy”) In fact, what is really meant when politicians when they say that is making the world safe for free markets – the very thing the author is supporting – because open foreign markets (ie not regulated by each foreign countries government) means cheap labor and goods fo the US.
Further, democracy is a political system, not an economic system. The author treats the two as if they were interchangeable. They are not. The economy can be one of the things which government regulates.
Majority rule does not imply violence anymore than any decision making process does.
If you are in class, and you have a group project, and each person has a different idea of what to do it on, no student fears his classmate will attack him for his opinion. They may argue about it, but ultimately which ever idea is most popular will win out. There is no coercion or threat involved.
That is democracy.
Not everyone gets their way, but it is understood that it is a group project, and things have to be decided or else everyone is going to fail.
The argument that anything which applies to one circumstance must apply to every possible circumstance is stupid and i am reluctant to even respond to it, but for the sake of argument, I will anyway.
In order to say that riding a bike to the store is good, you must say riding it everywhere is good. It is not good to ride a bike from your bed to the living room, nor is it good to ride it from Oakland to Japan. Since it isn’t good in every imaginable scenario, it must not be good for anything at all.
Democracy isn’t about the majority getting to “outvote” any minority about everything, its about an equitable way to make society wide decisions that need to be made for the benefit of everyone which the free market simply will not provide. Things like roads, disaster relief, environmental protection, and health care. Our country is a great example of what happens when you trust health care to the free market. If police and fire services were not public, only the middle class and above would have fires put out or protection from attackers.
A free market society is far from a consensus society.
A free market society means the richer you are the more “votes” you get.
He suggests roads could be maintained privately. There is no model to support that idea. Existing toll roads take decades to pay for themselves (and, incidentally, the toll roads I have been on in Ohio were much worse maintained than average). Bridges never pay for themselves. No company would go into a market with so low a return when there are other options available.
He suggests also that all market interactions be based on contract.
Who enforces those contracts?
How do they enforce them when there is no public court or police?
If courts are private, what stops them from siding with whoever is paying their fees (as we see happen consistently with arbitration companies and which is the reason almost all corporations prefer to use them)
A minimum wage does not force employers to lay off workers.
They could just as easily cut hours of everyone equally. Better yet, the company could be worker owned, in which case they can divide up the amount of thier own labor which was diverted to the managers and owners who do not do any of the actual work yet make far more of the income.
For all the bitching Ford does about employee costs, its CEO made $21 million – in a year they had huge losses and needed government help. Meanwhile Toyota, which is doing far better, paid their CEO less than 1 million.
That 20 million would have gone a long way to paying union wages, health care benefits, or retooling factories to make more efficient cars.
And that is not counting the CFO, the assistant CEO, the president and vice of the board of directors, product managers, or any of dozens of top level manager with million plus annual compensation.
If a company can not afford to provide a living wage to its lowest paid workers, than it is expanding faster than it sustainably can, and it needs to stop.
The authors comments on rent control are ridiculous. He doesn’t bother to give any indication of where people who can’t afford market rates should live. That’s the basic problem with all libertarian theory. It gets around the immorality of it by claiming that anyone who can’t afford, say, the market rate for food or water, must have made bad choices so it is their own fault they are poor so fuck them.
In the real world the rich are rich due to inheritance, the middle class send their kids to private school and college, and poverty is inherited the same way. Under the free market (or anarchy) their is no provision for the poor, the elderly, the disabled, or the abandoned young. Individual charity alone does not have the resources to help these groups.
The solution to rent control is to outlaw all ownership of rental housing.
You should not be able to charge someone just to live on a space on the Earth. You should not be able to make money when you are not actually doing any work. If every rental were put on the market at once, buying a house would become affordable.
I believe land ownership other than the land you yourself live on, for the purpose of profit, is inherently immoral, as is any other way of generating money without producing something of value to society.
If you personally built the house (not put up investment money, but got out there with a hammer and nails) then charge whatever the market will bear. But buying something because you have the capital just to charge someone rent? You are not providing anything of value because the house was already there, and if you didn’t “own” it the same tenants could be living there for free.
If this guy wants to stop voting, great! That means my vote has just a little bit more weight.
Now that’s a hefty load of ecognorance!
You can disagree with my opinions, even say I am wrong on facts, but it isn’t a matter of ignorance.
In addition to years of independent reading, subscriptions to the Motley Fool and Economist, and unquantifiable internet research, I also happen to have a degree in economics.
That is a very convenient way for you to write off any one who disagrees with you without actually responding to the arguments.
The article you linked to make a statement of “fact” which are in fact not inherent fact, and which can easily be shown to be false via real world examples.
I won’t get into all that here, but choosing to ignore any data which doesn’t fit the conclusion you want to believe is actually the very definition of ignorance.
If you are your brother (I am assuming?) really believe in what you are saying, I’d welcome constructive criticism on some of what I’ve written on economics and politics, particularly: Anarchy Vs Capitalism,
Predictions,
Free Market VS. Democracy : (1-0),
Taxes, and the contribution to society of the wealthy,
and
In which I point out that Republicans are not conservative at all.
All of these can be found on my here:
http://apps.biodieselhauling.org/Blog/?c=Economics
Clearly, from what you wrote, you do not understand economic theory. One could be very well read in a false theory, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re ignorant. At first, I was going to point out and refute all the fallacies in your first comment but that would have taken a few hours. There’s no point arguing with someone who’s not familiar with the theories.
Those subscriptions will not teach you economic theory. I’m mildly surprised that you have an econ degree. Usually people drop a lot of these false ideas, even from the statist economic education in the universities.
Economics is a logical-deductive science and can’t be falsified by empirical data. On this, see the work of Ludwig von Mises.
I took a look at a few of your articles, but they suffer from muddled thinking. For example, in Anarchy vs Capitalism, you make the fundamental error of equating anarchy with lawlessness. Anarchy means no rule, not no rules. There are many more errors (especially arguing that public goods cannot be provided on the market) but I’m not going to get into them. All I can suggest is to read up on economics and market anarchy.
Theory separated from the real world is meaningless and useless.
Anything which is unfalsifiable by empirical data has a special word: “faith”.
Aristotle used logical-deductive reasoning, and made conclusions about gravity. Newton proved them false with empirical data. Aristotle was a brilliant person, and his theories may have been logical, but when reality differs from theory, real science discards the theory.
Something which is purely deductive is not science. A scientific theory has to be able to make real-world predictions given a set of circumstances, and when implementing those circumstances, the predictions observed.
While linguistically no rule may not inherently mean no rules, in the real world, with no one to make rules, no one to enforce them, and no consequences for breaking them, there can be no distinction. In the real world you will never have unanimous consensus on all rules. If you make rules by general (majority) consensus, then that is, by definition, democracy. If rules are followed voluntarily, then they are suggestions, not rules. Its funny that you should point to that article, since I made the same argument that the one here made: the free market and democracy are incompatible.
Many, perhaps even most, public goods can be provided by the market (although not equitably or universally). There are a few that could not. Public streets and sidewalks in a city in front of everyone’s house and business. The modern economy couldn’t function without them, and there is no practical way to toll every single block independently.
Another is the legal system. A arbitration company has no way to enforce the ruling. A private security force, without any police or law, would be indistinguishable from a mercenary force.
Really, I have a much simpler retort.
Four words:
Tragedy of the Commons
We live in a finite world. There is a finite rate of regeneration of renewable resources. A free market does not regulate its rate of consumption, nor does it take into account externalities.
A failure of intelligent long-term regulation will hasten humanities trail along the wake of the yeast in a beer barrel – drowning in the waste of our own gluttony.
I think if you read what Mises had to say, you will be convinced. Again, economics is a logical-deductive science grounded on the irrefutable action axiom.
Again, you are arguing against market anarchy but you evidently have no familiarity with the theory. There is an exceptional body of literature showing how law, arbitration, roads, police, etc. can be (and have historically been) provided on the market.
Case in point, you bring up the old “finite world” canard. But on that, see: Humans ARE Smarter than Yeast
There’s no point in debating with you if you’re unfamiliar with market anarchist theory and economics. It would only be an excessively strenuous and frustrating effort on my part.
There’s no free market in the US today. What’s different is the degree of government regulation or presence in the particular industry. For example, IT industry is relatively free of regulations while law enforcement, courts, roads, education, coinage is almost completely monopolized by the government. As for healthcare, it’s far from private. Government pays for half of the expenses and enforces medical cartels that curb competition and raise prices. So don’t blame today’s issues on free market when it’s clearly the government’s fault.
Just because I disagree with it doesn’t mean I am unfamiliar with it.
I actually agree with much of what Mise says, and believe he makes valid points which many on all sides often fail to acknowledge.
I agree entirely with his position on government induced inflation and on patents, for example.
However, he does make some fundamental errors which invalidate some of his conclusions based on them.
Ch1, Acting Man, of Mises book begins with “Human action is necessarily always rational.”
This is demonstratively false.
The only irrefutable action axiom is that humans act. It can not be taken as axiom that humans act rationally in their own long term interests, particularly when the optimal outcome requires a level of individual sacrifice.
In game theory, many situations create an incentive for individuals acting in their own best interest to cause a worse outcome for the group as a whole (which of course includes the individual as well.)
For example: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12202559
http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2009/01/06/why-the-secret-to-speedier-highways-might-be-closing-some-roads-the-braess-paradox/
Even assuming individuals acted rationally in any individual moment, they neither take into account the effects of their individual choices aggregated over a large population nor the long-term effects. Because of this, even though as individuals we have the capacity for reason and the ability to make conscious choices, when allowed total freedom as a group we do in fact act the same as yeast.
The tragedy of the commons is a real phenomenon, which holds both in theory and in practice.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/284/5412/278
Pricing alone does not solve the problem, because it does not take externalties (such as pollution or a finite rate of resource regeneration) into account.
Then again, it is very easy to show that individuals do not even act rationally in the simpler terms of their own personal best interests either. Look at the success of casinos.
It goes far beyond gambling however:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html
Again, something which is purely logical-deductive is not science. It is philosophy at best, and faith at worst (since any deductions must be founded on assumptions about reality – in this case, the ultimate rationality of individual humans).
If you can find an example of law, local roads, or police being provided both efficiently and equitably purely by a market historically, or even describe a scenario in which it could even hypothetically arise, I would be very interested to read about it.
Now, aside from the dependence on individual rationality for faith in the free market, there are additional questions:
Mise does address externalites, for example injuries to employees
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap23sec6.asp
blaming them on market interference by governments which “allow” them to be unaccountable. However, he fails to explain who, in the absence of any government at all, would enforce labor standards, and how. If the problem is caused by a lack of regulation (or “deficient laws”), how would removing all regulations solve the problem? (Later Mises does implicitly acknowledge that this is neccesarily the role of government: “governments are [in a hypothetical ideal world] devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual’s life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap24sec5.asp).
This then begs questions of the form and structure of said government.
In the same section he makes the exact sort of external valuation of commodities he objects to in the opening chapters (while also showing his own racism) in saying “Many of the richest deposits of various mineral substances are located in areas whose inhabitants are too ignorant, too inert, or too dull to take advantage of the riches nature has bestowed upon them.” This in the context of objecting to government intervention conquest of land/peoples, and claiming war is the result of protectionism.
Even were a government to allow free trade, the dull ignorant natives might still choose not to extract and sell a resource at any price – yet the other nation would still have desire for it, no less than if it were a protectionist policy which kept them from it.
In other words, if a population chooses, for whatever reason, not to utilize a natural resource, it is acceptable, or even ideal, for them to be taken by force by those who would utilize them.
On a similar issue, his solution to the tragedy of the commons is to privatize everything
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap22sec5.asp
Aside from the practical impossibility of privatizing extremely large public resources (the ocean, the atmosphere, a large river (anyone dumping or fishing in their “own” section of river affects everyone downstream of them ) there remains the question of how initial prices of commons are to be set, who they are paid to, and if there is no such entity then how the distribution is to occur.
Mises claims that unemployment (of the employable) would be zero in a purely free-market system
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec2.asp
but offers no evidence, either theoretical or examples, to support it.
He suggests that the alternative to the gross inequalities inherent in capitalism is welfare.
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec1.asp
I won’t argue the merits of welfare for the overall benefit of society here, but instead point out that regulations to ensure equality does not necessitate any form of welfare.
It is possible to eliminate (or at least reduce) inequalities simply by taking steps to level the playing field. A major omission is the issue of inheritance. People who inherent wealth do not earn said wealth by contributing something of value to humanity. They just get lucky in which parents they are born to. Similarly, education, living environment, etc are not in an infants control, and these factors incontrovertibly have a direct effect on the individuals access to the means of wealth generation later in life. This itself is an external privilege, no different from the caste system (which he says restricts the market)
“What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume. In endorsing the principle of equality as a political postulate nobody wants to share his own income with those who have less. When the American wage earner refers to equality, he means that the dividends of the stockholders should be given to him. He does not suggest a curtailment of his own for the benefit of those 95 per cent of the earth’s population whose income is lower than his.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec3.asp
Actually, that IS what I suggest. The American middle class consumes far more than it’s share of world resources, at the expense of the rest of the world, (upheld only by having a military budget equal to the rest of the world combined).
“Many who are aware of the undesirable consequences of capital consumption are prone to believe that popular government is incompatible with sound financial policies. They fail to realize that not democracy as such is to be indicted, but the doctrines which aim at substituting the Santa Claus conception of government for the night watchman conception.”
Exactly.
“Even those who look upon the inequality of wealth and incomes as a deplorable thing, cannot deny that it makes for progressing capital accumulation. And it is additional capital accumulation alone that brings about technological improvement, rising wage rates, and a higher standard of living.”
I do not deny those. I question whether they are ends to themselves past the point where a society has obtained security in the basic necessities of life, and if they are in fact so desirable to be worth the trade off of gross (unearned) inequalities.
Realize that I accept that inequalities will exist due to differences in how hard a person works or how innovative they are.
It comes down, ultimately, to a moral issue.
And it was morality which the original blog entry was commenting on, not the method by which a society can most raise its average standard of living.
All this time we have been discussing only economics, while you ignored my points on democracy – as much the original focus as economics.
In my first comment I made a simple example: 3 or more people need to work together to get something done. If they don’t come to an agreement, there are negative consequences for everyone. It is not possible to have unanimity in every possible instance. If one or more people agree to go along with the majority consensus, that is democracy. It does not require coercion or threat of force.
This same situation, on the level of a society making large scale decisions, is all true democracy is.
It might be contrary to a maximization of wealth generation that a society collectively decides to enact an economically restrictive law. However, that is their choice.
In fact, in both the group and any true democracy, no one is forced to go along – however, if they do not, they can be ejected from the group because their association by other members is voluntary. As such, if someone objects to the laws of the US, they are free to move permanently to another country.
Jacob, that was a really long comment! But I must say, I disagree with nearly every statement you’ve made. To me, your post reads as a laundry list of statist fallacies and errors. I have neither the patience nor the time to dissect and refute all your points. We’ll have to agree to disagree for now. I can recommend some literature if you’re interested in learning more about market anarchism and praxeology:
-Economic Science and the Austrian Method – explains praxeology as an irrefutable logical-deductive science
-The Voluntary City – illustrates how so-called public goods have historically been provided on the market; including roads, law, courts, police, education, urban planning, and more. A very interesting read.
-Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections – a good, short defense of market anarchism
-Anarchy and the Law – the Motherlode
I can agree to disagree
I look forward to reading some of your suggestions when I get time.
I recommend also that you take a look at the links in my last comment sometime (they are all fairly short) – not so much so you can be “convinced”, but because actually understanding and sympathizing with the objections some people have to your ideas will put you in a much better position to explain and defend them when you write.
Presumably your whole goal in maintaining a site like this is to reach the people who are undecided – otherwise you are just preaching to the choir, and there isn’t a whole lot of point in that.
For every one person who strongly disagrees with you and can articulate exactly why, there are a hundred others who will share at least some of the same concerns – and those are the people you might convince.
p.s. Sorry about the multiple posts last time. For some reason I wasn’t getting any confirmation that they were being submitted, at and I was having network problems at the same time, so I thought they weren’t.
“Walter Block provides one such example: Two robbers break into your house and steal your TV. You catch them, but as philosophical robbers, they point out that they are two and you are only one. As a majority following democratic principles, the robbers can rightly take your TV. Or imagine a single mother living with her three children. When she refuses to feed them ice cream for breakfast, the children, as a majority, could legitimately vote her out of the house.”
I wasn’t originally going to leave a comment but the above passage just made me fume: what fucking stupid arguments! Unrealistic and derivatory, designed by a demagogue to fool idiots like this article’s writer. Can I believe it? Yes; after all this is from the same “theorist” that said that the book on The Bell Curve Theory would “stop the government trying to educate such people[blacks and other minorites].”
I can’t believe I put up with people like you to get the “whole picture” of opinions…
Fun to follow the above discussion. Even more fun to see “Toban Wiebe” declare he doesn’t give a shit about the argument if he has to do any more work to continue.
Right on Toban! Propaganda first, rationality maybe later.