Hoppe-ing Mad

Pure democracy is the problem, not the solution. If you don't believe me, listen to what James Madison had to say about it.

A couple of days ago, I posted about the book The God That Failed, a collection of essays about how communism failed, essays written by former communists who had abandoned the economic theory and the ideology springing from it.

Today, I want to bring to your attention another book along those themes but from a different perspective: Hans-Herman Hoppe’s 2001 book titled Democracy: The God That Failed.

In it, Hoppe makes the case that rather than being a pillar of civilization, democracy is the cause of its decline. Hoppe attributes democracy's failures to the ability of pressure and grievance groups to seek increased government expenditures, regulations, and taxation that inure to their benefit and a lack of countermeasures that can be used by their opposition to stop or mitigate those actions.

Pure democracy is tantamount to mob rule. All it takes to act is a simple majority. In most cases, a pure, unconstrained democracy is little different from a monarchy that replaces a king or queen with a majority intent on exercising monarchal rule.

In Federalist #10, James Madison wrote:

“…democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths…”  

Democracy has no restraint on government power and allows government and its minions to create and use unlimited power and force against the individual.

Democratic tyranny is not an eventuality, but it often is engaged in a seemingly normal, orderly manner, camouflaged, ironically, as protection of “the people”.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted:

“Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government, but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.”

Thanks to the wisdom of our founders, our federal government was purposely and specifically designed in such a way as to prevent it from becoming a democracy.  America was designed as a Republic, not a democracy.  

Madison continues in Federalist #10:

“From this view of the subject, it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.  A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.  Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths…”

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”

Remember what Professor Hayek wrote:

“What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.”