Democracy

Democracy is a government by the people; especially: rule of the majority. Alternatively, it is a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.

Ludwig von Mises favored democracy because he believed that a minority would, in the long run, be unable to rule over a majority that refused to acquiesce. Mises viewed democracy as a means of avoiding needless bloodshed and destruction by allowing the majority to peacefully take the reins of power, without resort to violent revolution. Later economists in the Austrian school, such as Murray Rothbard, argued against this view. Rothbard points out in Power and Market that there are many factors besides numerical strength that decide civil wars, and that civil disobedience can be an effective nonviolent method of revolution that does not require elections.

See also: Democracy: The God That Failed

Analysis

Democracy is the philosophical belief that the ideal form of government for a set of people is the government that a majority of them collaborate to construct. It is based on the concept of majoritarian popular sovereignty rather than individual sovereignty, which would require unanimous consent of the governed.

In a democracy, majorities of the people theoretically maintain the absolute right to partially or completely alter or abolish the theocracy, state committee or ruling council. In practice, barriers are sometimes erected to make it difficult or impossible for the majority to exercise its sovereignty. Examples might include supermajority voting requirements needed to amend a constitution, or campaign finance legislation that impedes the economic transactions needed for members of the majority to communicate freely concerning candidates and ballot initiatives.

The advent of sophisticated internet collaboration tools and ubiquitous access enables a practical citizen constructed constitution. This is a new development. In the past, it was impractical to have every citizen vote on the individual components of a governing system. Representatives of the people have classically been used to construct such systems. Even today, it is still quite costly for the people to do what is necessary to exercise their franchise intelligently. As Morris and Linda Tannehill point out in The Market for Liberty, "It has been said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But such vigilance is a constant non-productive expenditure of energy, and it is grossly unreasonable to expect men to keep expending their energy non-productively out of 'unselfish idealism.' There is no area of the free market which requires the constant vigilance of the entire population to keep it from going awry."

The centralization of power has overwhelmingly resulted in political systems that do not operate as advertised. Attention is rarely paid to effective mechanisms of oversight, and in many cases independent agencies are deliberately constructed to insulate them from political pressure. The inevitability of delegating some power to bureaucrats, and the implications of this, is analyzed in Mises' Bureaucracy. The concept of an independent judiciary has also been widely accepted as a fundamental necessity in a constitutional republic. Rothbard has pointed out that judiciaries appointed by the political branches, or elected by the public, are not really independent; and even if they were, they would then constitute an oligarchic dictatorship whose exercise of power would be incompatible with the existence of democracy, at least within the judiciary's sphere of action.

Though the term democracy has been used by many governments, there are no true democracies. Most governments fail to be true democracy because they fail one of the following tests.

1. Enfranchisement — The governed must have the ability to influence the government. Athens gave the right to vote to a subset of the people governed, notably omitting slaves and non-citizens. Many countries disenfranchise large groups of the governed, such as prisoners, minors, people who have not lived the required length of time in an electoral district, and so on.
2. Implied Consent — A true democracy emerges from the will of the governed. Current governments do not ratify their constitutions as new members are added to the contract. The vote of landowners in 1776 to enact a system only applies to them. Children are not bound by the contracts of their parents, although property bequeathed to them can be so encumbered.
3. Referendum — Majorities of the people must have the final say, and must be able to override the actions of their government according to a process they choose. There is currently one country in the world which allows the people to have the final say, and even there, it is limited. Switzerland stands alone as the only country where the people can vote down a war. Coincidentally, perhaps, it is the only country to stay completely out of war in the 20th century.

It is common to label some form of government as a "Democracy" and to analyze the principle, democracy, on those grounds. Democracy has only one inherent characteristic to analyze. It is the will of the majority of the people, for better or worse. The will of the people may be suffocating rules, flexible rules, or no rules at all.

Game theory

One hundred people walk into an ice cream shop. One of them says, "I think we should all get the same flavor of ice cream. Let's do it democratically."

The next step is not a vote on flavors. Democracy demands that the group be consulted to decide if they wish to collectively or individually submit to some set of rules intended to benefit them. While the suggestion was intended to bring the team closer together through shared ice cream flavor, every person is free to choose until they have agreed to contribute to the enforcement of some ruleset. This is, incidentally, the same concept embodied in rule 109 of Peter Suber's democracy simulation Nomic.

The key difference between the democracy simulated in that game and the democracy practiced by national governments is that there is no equivalent to rule 113: "A player always has the option to forfeit the game rather than continue to play or incur a game penalty. No penalty worse than losing, in the judgment of the player to incur it, may be imposed." In real-world democracies, the government will not allow individuals to secede and live their lives free of the taxation and regulation approved by the majority; it would, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, "think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men."

Links

• Democracy’s Most Critical Defect by Robert Higgs, October 2009
• Democracy and Faits Accomplis by Robert Higgs, December 2009
• How to Win an Election by Mark Brandly, February 2011
• The Paradox of Imperialism by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, November 2006
• A Libertarian Case for Monarchy by Leland B. Yeager, 2004
• World in the Grip of an Idea: 17. Sweden: Tightening the Screws by Clarence B. Carson, May 1978
• Democracy at Wikipedia