DemocracyThe God That Failed

by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

  VI

  After more than a century of compulsory democracy, the predictable results are before our very eyes. The tax load imposed on property owners and producers makes the economic burden even of slaves and serfs seem moderate in comparison. Government debt has risen to breathtaking heights. Gold has been replaced by government manufactured paper as money, and its value has continually dwindled. Every detail of private life, property, trade, and contract is regulated by ever higher mountains of paper laws (legislation). In the name of social, public or national security, our caretakers "protect" us from global warming and cooling and the extinction of animals and plants, from husbands and wives, parents and employers, poverty, disease, disaster, ignorance, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, and countless other public enemies and dangers. And with enormous stockpiles of weapons of aggression and mass destruction they "defend" us, even outside of the U.S., from ever new Hitlers and all suspected Hitlerite sympathizers.

  However, the only task a government was ever supposed to assume—of protecting our life and property—our caretakers do not perform. To the contrary, the higher the expenditures on social, public, and national security have risen, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, and depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: of personal independence, economic strength, and private wealth. The more paper laws have been produced, the more legal uncertainty and moral hazard has been created, and lawlessness has displaced law and order. And while we have become ever more helpless, impoverished, threatened, and insecure, our rulers have become increasingly more corrupt, dangerously armed, and arrogant.

  At this point, the question of the future of liberalism arises. It is appropriate to return to my beginning: to Ludwig von Mises and the idea of a liberal social order. Like Etienne de la Boetie and David Hume before him, Mises recognized that the power of every government, whether of princes or caretakers, benevolent men or tyrants, rests ultimately on opinion rather than physical force. The agents of government are always only a small proportion of the total population under their control, whether under princely or democratic rule. Even smaller is the proportion of central government agents. But this implies that a government, and in particular a central government, cannot possibly impose its will upon the entire population, unless it finds widespread support and voluntary cooperation within the nongovernmental public. As La Boetie put it:

  He who thus domineers over you ... has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What would he do to you if you yourself did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and mightier to hold you in check.18

  However, if the power of every government rests only on opinion and consensual cooperation, then, as Mises's foremost student and our other intellectual master, Murray N. Rothbard, explained in his introduction to La Boetie's sixteenth century treatise, it also follows that each government can be brought down by a mere change of opinion and the exercise of sheer will power. "For if tyranny really rests on mass consent, then the obvious means for its overthrow is simply mass withdrawal of that consent."19 That is, in order to strip government of its powers and repair it to the status of a voluntary membership organization (as before 1861), it is not necessary to take it over, to engage in violent battle against it, or even to lay hands on one's rulers. In fact, to do so would only reaffirm the principle of compulsion and aggressive violence underlying the current system and inevitably lead to the replacement of one government or tyrant by another. To the contrary, it is only necessary that one decide to withdraw from the compulsory union and reassume one's right to self protection. Indeed, it is essential that one proceed in no other way than by peaceful secession and noncooperation.20

  18Etienne de la Boetie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975), p. 52.

  If this advice seems at first naive (what difference does it make if you or I decide to secede from the Union?), its status as a genuine strategy of social revolution becomes apparent once the full implications of an act of personal secession are spelled out. The decision to secede involves that one regard the central government as illegitimate, and that one accordingly treat it and its agents as an outlaw agency and "foreign" occupying forces. That is, if compelled by them, one complies, out of prudence and for no other reason than self-preservation, but one does nothing to support or facilitate their operations. One tries to keep as much of one's property and surrender as little tax money as possible. One considers all federal law, legislation and regulation null and void and ignores it whenever possible. One does not work or volunteer for the central government, whether its executive, legislative, or judicial branch, and one does not associate with anyone who does (and in particular not with those high up in the hierarchy of caretakers). One does not participate in central government politics and contributes nothing to the operation of the federal political machinery. One does not contribute to any national political party or political campaign, nor to any organization, agency, foundation, institute, or think-tank cooperating with or funded by any branch of the federal Leviathan or anyone living or working in or near Washington D.C.

  19Ibid.,p.l5.

  20Rothbard explains in his introduction to La Boetie (ibid., p. 17):

  It was a medieval tradition to justify tyrannicide of unjust rulers who break the divine law, but La Boetie's doctrine, though non-violent, was in the deepest sense far more radical. For while the assassination of a tyrant is simply an isolated individual act within an existing political system, mass civil disobedience, being a direct act on the part of large masses of people, is far more revolutionary in launching a transformation of the system itself. It is also more elegant and profound in theoretical terms, flowing immediately as it does from La Boetie's insight about power necessarily resting on popular consent; for then the remedy to power is simply to withdraw that consent.

  Instead, with as much of one's property as can possibly be secured from the hands of government one begins to provide for one's own protection and adopts a new systematic twofold investment strategy. On the one hand, just as the existence of private crime requires an appropriate defense such as locks, guns, gates, guards, and insurance, so the existence of government requires specific defense measures: that one invest in such forms and at such locations which withdraw, remove, hide, or conceal one's wealth as far as possible from the eyes and arms of government. But defensive measures are not sufficient. In order to gain full protection of one's property from the reaches of government, it is necessary not to remain isolated in one's decision to secede. Not everyone must follow one's example, of course. Indeed, it is not even necessary that a majority of the entire population do so. It is necessary, however, that at least a majority of the population at many separate localities do so, and to reach this critical level of mass withdrawal it is essential to complement one's defensive measures with an offensive strategy: to invest in an ideological campaign of delegitimi
zing the idea and institution of democratic government among the public.

  The mass of people, as La Boetie and Mises recognized, always and everywhere consists of "brutes," "dullards," and "fools," easily deluded and sunk into habitual submission. Thus today, inundated from early childhood with government propaganda in public schools and educational institutions by legions of publicly certified intellectuals, most people mindlessly accept and repeat nonsense such as that democracy is self-rule and government is of, by, and for the people. Even if they can see through this deception, most still unquestioningly accept democratic government on account of the fact that it provides them with a multitude of goods and benefits. Such "fools," observed La Boetie, do not realize that they are "merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them."21 Thus, every social revolution will necessarily have to begin with just a few uncommon men: the natural elite.

  21Ibid.,p.70.

  This is how La Boetie describes this elite and its role:

  There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off: these are the men who never become tamed under subjection and who always, like Ulysses on land and sea constantly seeking the smoke of his chimney, cannot prevent themselves from peering about for their natural privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their former ways. These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and farsighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfaction, no matter how well disguised.22

  Just as there can be no revolution without a liberal-libertarian elite, however, so can there also be no revolution without some form of mass participation. That is, the elite cannot reach its own goal of restoring private property rights and law and order unless it succeeds in communicating its ideas to the public, openly if possible and secretly if necessary, and awakening the masses from their subservient slumber by arousing, at least temporarily, their natural instinct of wanting to be free. As Mises put it: "The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority."23

  Hence, the decision by members of the elite to secede from and not cooperate with government must always include the resolve of engaging in, or contributing to, a continuous ideological struggle, for if the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones. Yet just as one must be always cautious and careful regarding one's material investments, it is equally important that one be eternally vigilant and selective in one's ideological investments.

  In particular, in this endeavor it is not sufficient to merely criticize or support critics and criticisms of specific government policies or personalities, for even if correct and popular, such criticism does not penetrate to the root of the problem. In the terminology of the "New Left," it is "immanent to the system" and thus harmless from the point of view of government. Accordingly, any support given to such efforts, however well-intended, is at best wasteful and at worst further increases the power of government. Rather, while criticisms and critics of government may start with specific policies or personalities, or even if they must do so to attract mass attention, everything and everyone worth supporting will have to go further. Every critic and criticism deserving of support must proceed to explain each and every particular government failing as symptomatic of an underlying flaw in the very idea of government itself (and of democratic government in particular). In other words, no critic or criticism is worthy of anyone's support unless it exposes as intellectual fraud the two pillars on which all government power rests: the belief that the protection of private property, unique among all goods, necessitates a compulsory monopoly (a nonvoluntary membership organization), and that private property and protection are best secured if entry into this monopoly of law and order is free and its directors are elected democratically.

  22Ibid.,p.65.

  23Mises, Human Action, p. 864.

  In fact, there must never be even the slightest wavering in one's commitment to uncompromising ideological radicalism ("extremism"). Not only would anything less be counterproductive, but more importantly, only radical—indeed, radically simple—ideas can possibly stir the emotions of the dull and indolent masses. And nothing is more effective in persuading the masses to cease cooperating with government than the constant and relentless exposure, desanctification, and ridicule of government and its representatives as moral and economic frauds and impostors: as emperors without clothes subject to contempt and the buttofall jokes.

  If and only if the members of the natural liberal-libertarian elite have fully grasped this lesson and begin to act accordingly will liberalism have a future. Only then will they have done what La Boetie advised us all to do:

  Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces."

  24La Boetie, The Politics of Obedience, pp. 52-53.

  4

  On Democracy, Redistribution, and the Destruction of Property

  Imagine a world government, democratically elected according to the principle of one-man-one-vote on a worldwide scale. What would the probable outcome of an election be? Most likely, we would get a Chinese-Indian coalition government. And what would this government most likely decide to do in order to satisfy its supporters and be reelected? The government would probably find that the so-called Western world had far too much wealth and the rest of the world, in particular China and India, far too little, and that a systematic wealth and income redistribution would be necessary.1 Or imagine that in your own country the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds. While the government would not likely be staffed of children, its policies would most definitely reflect the "legitimate concerns" of children to have "adequate and "equal" access to "free" french fries, lemonade, and videos.2

  With these "thought experiments" in mind, there can be no doubt about the consequences which resulted from the process of democratization that began in Europe and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century and has come to fruition since the end of World War I. The successive expansion of the franchise and finally the establishment of universal adult suffrage did within each country what a world democracy would do for the entire globe: it set in motion a seemingly permanent tendency toward wealth and income redistribution.3

  1The combined population of China and India is around 2.2 billion (of a current world population of about 6 billion). By contrast, the combined population of Westem Europe and North America is approximately 700 million.

  2During the mid-nineteenth century the average life-expectancy in Western Europe and North America was approximately forty years. At that time, apart from being restricted exclusively to males as well as by significant minimum property requirements, the franchise was restricted by a minimum age requirement of typically twenty-five years (in some places such as the United Kingdom and Sweden the requirement was as low as twenty-one years, and in others such as France and Denmark it was as high as thirty years). Nowadays, while the average life-expectancy in Western Europe and North America has risen to well above seventy years, the franchise extends everywhe
re to males and females, all property requirements have been abolished, and the minimum voting age has been generally lowered to eighteen years. If the original "maturity" requirements had been maintained, the minimum age should have been raised instead: from on the average twenty-five years to about fifty years!

  One-man-one-vote combined with "free entry" into government democracy implies that every person and his personal property comes within reach of and is up for grabs by everyone else. A "tragedy of the commons" is created.4 It can be expected that majorities of "have-nots" will relentlessly try to enrich themselves at the expense of minorities of "haves." This is not to say that there will be only one class of have-nots and one class of haves, and that the redistribution will occur uniformly from the rich onto the poor. To the contrary. While the redistribution from rich to poor will always play a prominent role, it would be a sociological blunder to assume that it will be the sole or even the predominant form of redistribution.5 After all, the "permanently" rich and the "permanently" poor are usually rich or poor for a reason. The rich are characteristically bright and industrious, and the poor typically dull, lazy, or both.6 It is not very likely that dullards, even if they make up a majority, will systematically outsmart and enrich themselves at the expense of a minority of bright and energetic individuals. Rather, most redistribution will take place within the group of the "non-poor," and frequently it will actually be the better-off who succeed in having themselves subsidized by the worse-off. Consider, for example, the almost universal practice of offering a "free" university education, whereby the working class, whose children rarely attend universities, pay through taxation for the education of middle-class children!7 Moreover, it can be expected that there will be many competing groups and coalitions trying to gain at the expense of others. There will be various changing criteria defining what it is that makes one person a "have" (deserving to be looted) and another a "have-not" (deserving to receive the loot). At the same time, individuals will be members of a multitude of groups of "haves" and/or "have-nots," losing on account of one of their characteristics and gaining on account of another, with some individuals ending up net-losers and others net-winners of redistribution.