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Now That Americans No Longer Believe In Elections, What Alternatives Will We Choose To Escape Each Others’ Control?

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Thousands of National Guard troops patrol the nation’s capital as I write, hoping to ensure that the scheduled transition of power from one president to the next comes off without renewed violence. That sight—unusual for the United States—underlines the fact that millions of Americans no longer support the political system or believe it derives its powers “from the consent of the governed” (as the Declaration of Independence puts it). It also strongly suggests that it’s time to try something new if the government under which we live is to be anything better than a resented force at war with much of the population it rules.

The militarization of Washington, D.C., comes after the January 6 storming of the Capitol —a shocking event with as-yet to be determined repercussions that was actually supported by a fifth of voters and 45 percent of Republicans, according to post-riot polling. Perhaps that’s not as surprising as it should be; well before the ginned-up controversy over the presidential election results, only 24 percent of voters believed the government had the consent of the governed (53 percent disagreed), as reported by a 2018 survey. Maybe the real marvel is that we avoided a January 6-style event for so long.

We’ve built toward this point for years. While the Trumpists’ storming of the Capitol was an unprecedented rejection of the established procedures for transferring power, it built on trends. From the contested, but peaceful, 2000 election, to the boycotting of Trump’s 2016 victory by dozens of Democratic members of Congress as other opponents rioted blocks away, Americans have moved toward belief in the legitimacy of elections only if their side wins. At some point, we were going to see an outright refusal to accept a loss, which is what occurred on January 6.

And there’s no reason to expect that people will lose their distaste for political defeat in future political contests.

How could Americans be accepting of electoral losses when many view their opponents as immoral and unpatriotic and see them as enemies of the country—to the point that the major factions are defined by their hatreds? “Democrats and Republicans … have grown more contemptuous of opposing partisans for decades, and at similar rates,” notes a November 2020 paper on political sectarianism. “Only recently, however, has this aversion exceeded their affection for copartisans.”

To a large extent this is because politics has become combat, with election victors using their control of government agencies to torment losers.

“It is more and more dangerous to lose an election,” economist John Cochrane, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, wrote in September. “The vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed is the core reason for increased partisan vitriol and astounding violation of basic norms on both sides of our political divide.”

No sane people would consent to a political system that works as a weapon against them; they would try to escape its power. One of the virtues of the original decentralized American republic and its federalism was that if you didn’t like the laws and rulers where you lived, you could go elsewhere.

“Foot voting is still underrated as a tool for enhancing political freedom: the ability of the people to choose the political regime under which they wish to live,” George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote in a 2012 paper since expanded into a book. “When people are able to choose their governments, political leaders have stronger incentives to adopt policies that benefit the people, or at least avoid harming them. And the people themselves are able to select the policies they prefer.”

The “people” Somin references aren’t the amorphous masses discussed in Social Studies classes as marching to the polls to jam the alleged will of the winners down the throats of the losers. He means individuals turning their backs on governing systems they dislike and picking those that better suit them.

But, as Chapman University law professor Tom Bell—another advocate of political choice—points out in his 2018 book Your Next Government?, “the United States has in recent decades failed to take states’ rights seriously, making federal law supreme even in minutely local matters.”

Moving does little good when the laws and “vanishing ability to lose an election and not be crushed” (as Cochrane put it) follow you.

Even reviving federalism would accomplish little when many states have larger populations than the whole country did at its founding and the major political divides run not between states or regions, but between urban and rural areas. Within localities are many people who feel trapped by circumstances in “enemy territory,” subject to hostile rulers and laws they despise.

How do we make more palatable a political system that functions as a death match between mutually loathing factions who believe themselves—with reason—to be in peril when their enemies win control?

“If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state—to relinquish its protection and to refuse paying toward its support,” Herbert Spencer famously argued in 1851. Fundamentally, Spencer wanted the right to exit that Somin favors, but without the physical migration of foot voting, as a means of making political arrangements more widely acceptable and considerate of liberty.

But Somin not only favors radical decentralization to minimize the costs of migration, he also discusses arrangements whereby “individual citizens can change government service-providers without a physical move.” Bell, too, believes that “for the same reason that nation states should and generally do allow the unhappy residents to emigrate, more consent-rich governing services would doubtless guarantee the freedom of citizen-customers to exit to other legal systems” without moving their locations.

In 2001, Swiss economist Bruno Frey proposed what he called functional, overlapping, competing jurisdictions—basically, governments that people choose among as if picking club memberships.

Frey echoed Belgian economist Paul Emile de Puydt who, in the 1860 article “Panarchy,” advocated a system of non-territorial federalism under which people could freely register their support for, or withdrawal from, any political associations that gain sufficient support. “I hope we can all go on living together wherever we are, or elsewhere, if one likes, but without discord, like brothers, each freely holding his opinions and submitting only to a power personally chosen and accepted,” de Puydt wrote.

These proposals expand on Spencer’s “right to ignore the state” in empowering people to join with the like-minded not just to reject officials and laws that don’t suit them, but to construct systems that do.

Their advocates emphasize existing precedents for choice in government. “People choose between governments every time they choose to live in a new city, state, or country,” writes Bell. “Businesses and others are often able to choose for themselves which state’s law will govern their dealings with each other, even if they do not actually reside in the state in question,” points out Somin.

What if Americans could choose governing systems rather than having them jammed down their throats? They could embrace rules as limited or restrictive as they please, programs and policies that suit their tastes, and officials who resist treating election to office as opportunities to punish enemies. If dissatisfied, they could exit one system and choose another—just as they can now, but without having to shoulder the hassle and expense of loading a rental truck and driving across a border. Tensions might ease and violence become less likely if people who hold each other’s values and lifestyles in contempt didn’t have to fear government as a bludgeon in the hands of their enemies.

True, American politics has been moving away from allowing exit in recent years, centralizing power so that people can’t escape and even attempting to continue taxing those who flee, as California lawmakers propose. But the result has been battles between rebellious localities and higher authorities. And now troops patrol the streets of the nation’s capital because nobody is willing to lose elections.

We can have a future of increasing conflict between Americans who hate each other. Or we can make it easier for people to peacefully escape each other’s control.

The Gulf Between The Rulers And We Who Are Ruled Is Now Unbridgeable.

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The gulf between the government and the governed is wider than it has ever been and getting wider. Of course, it has always been there. Many of the authors of the Constitution were feudal plantation owners and wealthy city lawyers in a land of farmers and laborers, but at least they understood principles of natural law, liberty and individualism.

Today, all pretensions of sympathy with the citizenry have been dropped. The ruling class despises us. It is an across-the-board dismissal of the relevance of an electorate.

Spending Is Independent Of Taxation.

The old complaint was “No taxation without representation”. That’s now superseded by the principle that the government can spend whatever it wants, unrestricted by the amount of tax revenues collected. When governments spent more than the taxpayers gave them, it used to be called a deficit. Today, with modern monetary theory (MMT), even the soft shackles of deficit spending have been eliminated. According to MMT, a sovereign government with its own money printing press can spend without restraint. Therefore it need pay no attention to the tax base or the taxpayers. Their opinions have no merit. And government power lies in its expenditures; that power is expanding all the time, unconstrained.

The Overwhelming Administrative State.

Unlimited government spending brings into being an unlimited administrative state. Legislators write a torrent of laws, but they’re meaningless without enforcement. The administrative state is enforcement. First, they translate and expand legislation into copious rules and regulations and requirements for permits, completed forms, and conformity to arcane requirements expressed in small print in indecipherable language. Second, they apply the rules and regulations with inspections, enforcement actions, fines, imprisonment, cease and desist orders and confiscation. It’s virtually impossible to fight the IRS, the SEC or the FDA if a business or an individual gets on the wrong side of them. There is no balance of power; it’s all on the government’s side.

Authoritarianism.

Unconstrained spending, unconstrained rule-making and unconstrained enforcement quickly become authoritarianism: what they say goes. Think of all the businesses that have been shut down during the pandemic lockdowns by city authorities, county health boards or state governors. Where did the authority come from to do that? They just grabbed it, asserted it, imposed it. They are the imposers and we are the imposed upon.

Expert rule: their word is law.

One of the consequences of the increasing power of the administrative state is their assertion of expertise as an underpinning of their authority. As we are experiencing, this is not science.

The scientific method is a mode of inquiry, a collaboration around alternative possible answers to challenging questions. Different individuals and groups develop different hypotheses, test those hypotheses, analyze the results of their tests and eventually arrive at a consensus position backed by many iterations of data from multiple levels ranging from the microscope and laboratory to the natural world.

This is not how the so-called science of government-approved experts applies. To the contrary, their experts are always right, and the directions they give must be faithfully followed. If those experts change their minds or change their directions, their new positions are the correct ones and must be followed even if they represent a reversal of a previous course (“wear masks”, “don’t wear masks”).

Most importantly, your opinion does not matter and your data does not count. Only government-approved experts can be “right”.

Corporatism – a new control route.

In the US, we are reluctant to think about our large corporations as arms of or as agents for government control. Yet recently, we’ve been jarred from our complacency by the sudden exertion of politically opportunistic speech controls by Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon. These 4 companies represent large centers of private power and are dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people (as Scott Galloway, author of The Four, phrased it). But now we begin to learn about how intertwined they are with government, via shared purpose, shared contracts, lobbying, and payments. They are no longer limited to the exertion of private power, they can deploy power on behalf of, or alongside, government.

They despise us.

The degree to which we are the object of the derision of the ruling class can be captured in the remarks of those at the very top of the pyramid.

In April, 2008, Barack Obama said:

“And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama saw us as an underclass.

Further, the underclass was labeled by Obama as being against others not like them – yet, this same underclass helped elect Obama to the office of president a few months later.

Eight years later, Hillary Clinton confirmed the ruling class point of view:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

If you believe there is something in America worth saving and celebrating, you are deplorable and irredeemable. You are not America.

We despise them.

Pew Research publishes polls depicting measures of trust in government, the proxy for our ruling class. In 1964, Pew reports that 77% of Americans said they can trust the government in Washington. In 2019, that number was 17%. Its low point was 2011, when only 10% of Americans said they could trust the government. The latest published number is 17%.

So up to 90% of Americans display a lack of trust in the institutions of the ruling class: their legislation, their security systems, their police forces, their administrative bureaucracies, their regulations, their electoral procedures, their experts, their entire system of rule.

This is the ultimate condemnation. We used to believe – we were taught in school, anyway – that our institutions had emerged beneficently over time to protect, support, and ensure our way of life. Now the ruling class has undermined the most fundamental of the binding institutions, democracy.

Charles Ess, professor of digital ethics, at the University of Oslo, is quoted on the Pew Research site as saying,

“Democracy – its foundational norms and principles, including basic rights to privacy, freedom of expression and rights to contest and conscientiously disobey – may survive in some form and in some places by 2030; but there are many strong reasons, alas, to think that it will be pushed to the margins in even traditionally democratic countries by the forces of surveillance capitalism, coupled with increasing citizen feelings of powerlessness against these forces, along with manipulation of information and elections, etc. “

The gulf between rulers and ruled is now unbridgeable. We await the next stage.

 

 

The Twelve Evidentiary Fields Of Chicanery That Could End Our Faith In Democracy.

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Statists try to put a pro-individualism spin on democracy – “one person, one vote” – in order to justify the most anti-individualist implementation: majority rule, or what James Madison called mob rule. What if it was revealed that the entire election process is manipulated and untrustworthy? That seems to be what is happening in 2020, and it should end whatever residual faith there may be in the democracy charade. 

This election doesn’t pass the smell test. I participated in an eight-hour podcast from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. on Election Night and noted a number of anomalies at the time, none of which makes any sense in retrospect unless you entertain the possibility of massive chicanery.

This essay is only in the nature of exploratory questioning, because I’m sure many more oddities will come to light in the coming days, so I’ll focus mostly on the strange contradictions that occurred to me on Election Night, even if they didn’t fully register then, and why the official media narrative doesn’t pass muster.

That evening I was convinced Trump had won easily, as were so many other observers, overperforming in such a way that a Biden victory in the late stages seemed inconceivable. But then in the early morning hours, we had the surprising new narrative of a miraculous Biden comeback to contend with.

1)  Discussion of exit polls has disappeared from the media. Exit polls should roughly match final results, but when they don’t they’re usually sidelined from scrutiny after the early going. We heard that voters around the country mostly dismissed the virus narrative and chose the economy as the primary concern, on which Trump scored much better than Biden—but we are asked to believe they went for Biden anyway? Down-ballot results suggest a massive repudiation of liberal messaging, as the electorate failed to be swayed by the hysterical propaganda, yet the result at the top appears at odds with this clear refusal.

2)  In the early states that reported, particularly Florida, Trump made big gains among Latinos, African Americans, and Asians. Some of these gains would appear to have been of an historic nature. This should have translated to other states, and ruled out Arizona, Nevada, and Texas for Biden. But while this did happen in Texas, apparently Latinos in Arizona and Nevada went their own way. If African Americans, particularly males, were so resistant to Biden in the early states that were reported, how could they approve of him in such overwhelming numbers in the decisive cities of Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Atlanta?

3)  In every election, early patterns suggest trends to follow, as one should be able to extrapolate from baseline results to overarching conclusions. Behavior that occurs in one landscape should replicate in similar landscapes when similar parties are involved. But none of this seems to have happened on election night, at least after a certain point when the “pivot” occurred. As my podcast host Keaton Weiss noted throughout the night, he wasn’t seeing any overall trend, just state-by-state results, as though each state were voting in an independent election and following its own peculiar logic. National elections typically don’t unfold that way.

4)  The benign interpretation of the Biden comeback would be the “Red Mirage” effect we have been warned about so extensively. We are asked to “be patient as all the votes are counted,” and as we get used to accepting elections that are not concluded on the same day but last indefinitely. So we must believe that the urban vote in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Phoenix would be so overwhelmingly in Biden’s favor that it would swamp Trump’s stupendous early leads in each of the last seven disputed states. But all night long, as my host kept crunching the numbers from Biden-leaning counties, it didn’t seem credible that the compensation in Democratic counties would be able to overcome the already announced results.

5.  The New York Times needle showed North Carolina leaning toward Trump at 95 percent most of the night, and likewise Georgia at around 87 percent, until the latter started tilting back toward Biden very late. The needle is supposed to be an accurate reflection of all the available data, yet North Carolina was not called despite most of the vote having come in.

6)  Apart from a handful of outlets such as this one, there has been little acknowledgment of the unprecedented yearlong polling discrepancy, which dwarfs the “error” of 2016 by a large magnitude. This was clear to anyone following the election on the ground, comparing the vast size of Trump’s rallies versus Biden’s anemic turnouts, or the wild enthusiasm among Trump voters versus the limited allure of Biden among the technocratic liberal class. These ridiculous pre-election polls were meant to rationalize Biden’s win, providing room for any kind of maneuver that would help procure the desired result in the end.

7)  For months we seem to have been subjected to unrelenting psychological warfare warning us that there would be an illusory “Red Mirage,” that Trump would try to steal the election and that he would turn out his crazy followers on the streets in a display of fascistic violence if the results didn’t go his way. This single-minded focus on one side actually seems to have been paving the way for precisely such actions on the other side—minus, of course, the street action, because it doesn’t seem to have been necessary.

8)  The DNC openly stole the primaries from Bernie Sanders, starting with stopping the vote count in Iowa (courtesy of Pete Buttigieg’s friends in intelligence, the same Pete “the cheat” who has been all over the media justifying the delayed vote-counting), to orchestrating phantom primaries in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona (three of the same states that have been at the center of the general election outcome).

Inexplicable exit poll anomalies occurred on Super Tuesday, accompanied by insane Biden turnout in states from Virginia to Minnesota, exceeding even the enthusiasm of African Americans for Barack Obama. I documented all this minutely in an early April essay, and openly wondered at the time if it was a dry run for what was to come in the general election and whether Sanders’ greatest disservice to the nation, out of all the fictions and manipulations he has embodied, was to justify an illegitimate Democratic primary in order to normalize all of its disturbing elements for the general election.

9)  One of the most egregious anomalies in the Democratic primary was Maricopa County, where despite most polling stations being closed, and very thin turnout being reported during the day, by the end of the day such thin numbers were predictably reported as having turned into record turnout. Michigan was the state where Bernie made his last stand, but lost surprisingly poorly, after which he quit except in name only. Wisconsin held a phantom primary during the pandemic, without any GOTV effort on Sanders’s part, again a pattern replicated in the general election when Biden essentially stopped campaigning for the year except very sporadically in the last few weeks.

10)  When Trump won Ohio by a huge margin (8 percent), the three of us on the podcast felt that it bode very poorly for Biden in Pennsylvania and the rest of the industrial Midwest. Indeed, in any rational election, this should have held true. Yet the final results are completely at odds with the early direction.

11)  Likewise, we felt that with Trump increasing his margin in Florida from 2016, and doing so well among Latinos and African Americans, Georgia and North Carolina should be out of reach for Biden. But in this election apparently there are no bellwether states, just state by state independent results.

12)  The Democrats suffered substantial losses in the House, and apparently failed to win the Senate, which we were assured by the pollsters they had all but sealed. In an election with such an expanded viable map for Biden (with Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona in play), how is it possible that at the same time the Democrats would do so abysmally in the House and Senate races despite spending enormous sums of money? Indeed, as in Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) case, the margin of difference for some of the most ballyhooed races is mind-boggling. But, again, it didn’t translate to the national race, as it should have done.

Trump’s reelection would have posed an existential threat to the liberal elites, and their entire institutional cover-up, from which it would have been very difficult to recover. Their propaganda empire did its best to hold the fort from 2015 until the 2020 election, but to overcome a second, and even more ringing, validation of Trump’s oppositional ideology at the polls would have been too much even for this shameless deep state. There would have been a revolution on the Left (a real one, not led by a feckless Sanders) to correspond with the populism on the Right.

The liberal elites don’t want populism of any kind—Left or Right—so both had to be crushed in equal measure, and by almost parallel nefarious means, one in the Democratic primary, the other in the general election.

Perhaps most worrisome of all is that a reign of blatant censorship has been in effect in the liberal media since March, as Big Tech appropriates more and more of the burdens of open propagation of deep state aims. The way in which Trump’s tweets since the election have been censored is a very bad sign indeed, and soon we can expect any questioning of election results to be entirely banned in the name of protecting readers from disinformation.

I hope Trump doesn’t concede as long as he is in office, and uses his remaining time to expose the potential for fraud in great detail, putting it all on record while he has the chance to do so. He should pursue every constitutional and legal means to dispute these funny results and take it all the way to Congress.

It likely won’t be long before Twitter and social media, and the media in general, ban him and anyone showing any signs of the illness known as “Trumpism” from an open platform, all in the name of protecting the public from misinformation.

The past four years represent a rolling coup d’etat against Trump’s truth-telling politics, starting from criminal investigations based on fantasy to the final insult of an election at odds with public opinion sneering at official propaganda. As with the rest of his presidency, we have seen two elections take place, one unfolding in real-time, the other playing out on the media’s timescale.

The role of a visionary leader is to expose precisely such fissures between reality and fantasy, which Trump has attempted with gusto at every turn. I found no moment of his presidency as touching as Thursday’s White House briefing when he lashed out at the establishment where it hurts the most, questioning the sacred mythology of American democratic machinery. Trump is guilty of committing the unpardonable crime of reviving politics, removing it from the bipartisan rhetoric that normalizes consensual inhumanity. For this deplorable trespass, the election needed to be overturned and banished to the fog of silence.

 

 

Democracy Proves To Be The Death Of The Constitution.

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Sadly for the American experiment in liberty, democracy has corrupted the original ideas to the point of destroying them. Our most recent Presidential election has ended in a tie (thus undermining the basic – although hateful – democratic concept of majority rule) because both sides are equally anti-freedom.

Is the U.S. Constitution the biggest roadkill on the 2020 campaign trail? Is faith in “American exceptionalism” blinding people to a death spiral of American democracy?

According to much of the media, this is a single-issue election: “It’s the pandemic, stupid,” as a Politico headline blared. Unfortunately, the media was not smart or honest enough to recognize the real issue this year: “It’s the Constitution, stupid.”

Surging Covid caseloads earlier this year led to a domino-like collapse on restraints on politicians across the land. In April, President Donald Trump proclaimed, “The federal government has absolute power. It has the power. As to whether or not I’ll use that power, we’ll see.” The Justice Department asked Congress for authorization to suspend habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic but was rebuffed. In September, the Centers for Disease Control somehow acquired the power to suspend tens of millions of rental contracts and prohibit any evictions of tenants who ceased paying rent until after the end of December.

But these decrees could be child’s play compared to what could follow after the election.

The Constitution was intended to place politicians under “house arrest” – to strictly limit their power over private citizens in perpetuity. But in 2020, “house arrest” has been the default decree of many governors, and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he may impose a national lockdown if more people test positive for Covid. Biden says he changed his mind and won’t shut down the economy. But his rhetorical reversal could be as nonbinding as were campaign promises to keep the nation out of war by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Biden has run one of the most brazen fear-based presidential campaigns in modern memory. He routinely exaggerates Covid death tolls by a hundred- or a thousand-fold and talks as if every American family has lost a member or two from this plague. The more fears that politicians fan, the easier it becomes to seize boundless power.

Covid shutdown advocates flaunt claims of “science and data” like righteous priests invoking God and the Bible to sanctify scourging enemies. In the same way that local health czars felt entitled to shut down all private and public schools if the Covid positivity rate exceeded 0.000008% of the population, so the next president may feel entitled to nullify the Constitution if more than a statistically insignificant number of people nationwide test positive. And it won’t matter that the tests are wildly inaccurate or that WHO overestimated the Covid fatality rate by 50-fold. Bogus Covid test results will be sufficient to euthanize bonafide constitutional rights.

Attorney General William Barr said that imposing a “national lockdown” would be “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history” except for slavery. But the dictatorial issues raised by lockdowns received as much attention from the media as the batting averages for the Amarillo Sod Poodles minor league baseball team.

Trump, to his credit, is now an outspoken opponent of lockdowns. But many Trump opponents are not opposed to dictators per se; they simply want different dictates. The passion for near-absolute power spurs the hostility increasingly shown towards the Constitution by many liberals, leftists, and violent protestors.

If a national lockdown is imposed, it won’t matter that it fails to keep people safe. So many individuals and agencies will benefit from the boundless power that they will always find a pretext to perpetuate restrictions. Health czars will respond to failure with the same type of ever greater force that characterized floundering socialist economies (brilliantly captured in John Jewkes’ 1948 masterpiece, Ordeal by Planning).

This year’s political developments have illustrated how easily politicians can nullify Americans’ rights merely by promising to play King Canute and magically sweep away a virus. Federal judge William Stickman IV ruled in September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But the response to the dictatorial governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen

Whitmer and New York’s Andrew Cuomo reveals that tens of millions of Americans will happily sacrifice anything and everything for promises of a risk-free life.

Can Americans read their future in the fetters proliferating in other English-speaking nations? Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced another national lockdown – 30 days of unmitigated misery, shutting down all “nonessential businesses” and confining people to their homes unless they have a few specific reasons to step out into the cold, cruel world. A senior cabinet member said yesterday that Britain’s shutdown may be extended beyond one month because “we will always be driven by what the data shows.” In New Zealand, the government last week announced it was creating “quarantine centers” for anyone who tests positive and refuses to obey government orders. One Twitter wag scoffed, “New Zealand went from gun bans to concentration camps in less than a year.”

If Americans could be confident that either Trump or Biden would be leashed by the law, there would be less dread about who wins. But elections nowadays are becoming simply coronations via vote counts. The president will take an oath of office on Inauguration Day but then can do as he or she pleases. Instead of vox populi, vox dei – “The voice of the people is the voice of God’ – we have “Damned Rascal Democracy.”

No one is entitled to the amount of power that the winner of this presidential election will commandeer over the American people. As Thomas Jefferson warned in 1799, “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Either the Constitution leashes the rulers, or the rulers leash the people. There is no middle way: there is no such thing as provisional legal inferiority to officialdom. If citizens trust rulers who blatantly violate the Constitution, they place themselves on the political chopping block.

Americans need to recognize the profound weaknesses revealed this year in democratic governments at every level. A strict adherence to the Bill of Rights is the surest way to reduce post-Election Day perils. If freedom is to survive, Americans must become far better informed of the dangers from government — regardless of who wins the Presidency.

James Bovard via aier.org.

The Consent Of The Governed, And Other Fictions.

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While government locks us down, restricts our movement, closes our businesses, and takes away our freedoms, part of our abject compliance can be traced to the fiction that government, and its elected and unelected authorities, have the consent of the governed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Supreme Court declared in 1943, “There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority.” In reality, the cardinal doctrines of contemporary democracy are layer upon layer of mystical claptrap. The phrases which consecrate democracy seep into many Americans’ minds like buried hazardous waste.

If Joe Biden wins the presidential election, voters will be told that our political system is redeemed: the “will of the people” is now clear, Biden will rule with “the consent of the governed,” and Americans are obliged to again trust and obey the federal government. If Donald Trump is reelected, much of the same media will continue howling about imaginary Russian plots. But these notions remain dangerous delusions regardless of who is declared the winner on Election Day.

The notion that election results represent the “will of the people” is one of the most shameless triumphs of democratic propaganda. Rather than revealing the “will of the people,” election results are often a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions. Votes which only reveal comparative contempt for competing professional politicians are transmogrified into approvals for blueprints to forcibly remake humanity.

Americans are encouraged to believe that their vote on Election Day somehow miraculously guarantees that the subsequent ten thousand actions by the president, Congress, and federal agencies embody “the will of the people.” In reality, the more edicts a president issues, the less likely that his decrees will have any connection to popular preferences. It is even more doubtful that all the provisions of hefty legislative packages reflect majority support, considering the wheeling, dealing, and conniving prior to final passage. Or maybe the Holy Ghost of Democracy hovers over Capitol Hill to assure that average Americans truly want every provision on every page of bills that most representatives and senators do not even bother reading?

A bastard cousin of the “will of the people” flimflam is the notion that citizens and government are one and the same. President Franklin Roosevelt, after five years of expanding federal power as rapidly as possible, declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.” President Johnson declared in 1964: “Government is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves,” though it wasn’t “the people” whose lies sent tens of thousands of American conscripts to pointless deaths in Vietnam. President Bill Clinton declared in 1996, “The Government is just the people, acting together—just the people acting together.” But it wasn’t “the people acting together” that bombed Serbia, invaded Haiti, blockaded Iraq, or sent the tanks in at Waco.

President Barack Obama hit the theme at a 2015 Democratic fundraiser: “Our system only works when we realize that government is not some alien thing; government is not some conspiracy or plot; it’s not something to oppress you. Government is us in a democracy.” But it was not private citizens who, during Obama’s reign, issued more than half a million pages of proposed and final new regulations and notices in the Federal Register; made more than 10 million administrative rulings; tacitly took control of more than 500 million acres by designating them “national monuments”; and bombed seven foreign nations. The “government is the people” doctrine makes sense only if we assume citizens are masochists who secretly wish to have their lives blighted.

Presidents perennially echo the Declaration of Independence’s appeal to “the consent of the governed.” But political consent is gauged very differently than consent in other areas of life. The primary proof that Americans are not oppressed is that citizens cast more votes for one of the candidates who finagled his name onto the ballot. A politician can say or do almost anything to snare votes; after Election Day, citizens can do almost nothing to restrain winning politicians.

A 2017 survey by Rasmussen Reports found that only 23 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has “the consent of the governed.” Political consent is defined these days as rape was defined a generation or two ago: people consent to anything which they do not forcibly resist. Voters cannot complain about getting screwed after being enticed into a voting booth. Anyone who does not attempt to burn down city hall presumably consented to everything the mayor did. Anyone who does not jump the White House fence and try to storm into the Oval Office consents to all executive orders. Anyone who doesn’t firebomb the nearest federal office building consents to the latest edicts in the Federal Register. And if people do attack government facilities, then they are terrorists who can be justifiably killed or imprisoned forever.

In the short term, the most dangerous democratic delusion is that conducting an election makes government trustworthy again. Only 20 percent of Americans trust the government to “do the right thing” most of the time, according to a survey last month by the Pew Research Center. Americans are being encouraged to believe that merely changing the name of the occupant of the White House should restore faith in government.

If Biden is elected, we will hear the same “redemption” storyline that was trumpeted when Obama replaced (temporarily) disgraced George W. Bush. The same media that ignored Biden’s corruption during the presidential campaign will insist that his inauguration purifies Uncle Sam. With Biden in charge, pundits and pooh-bahs will swear that it is safe to expand federal control over healthcare, education, housing, the economy, the environment, and anything else that moves.

But the benevolence of government rarely transcends the perfidy of politics. Washington will remain as venal as ever, regardless of the hallelujah chorus of PBS NewsHour panelists. When scandals erupt, citizens will be told to trust politically approved fixes to the system—even though most Washington reforms are like fighting crime by hiding the corpses of victims.

It is time to demystify democracy. The surest effect of exalting democracy is to make it easier for politicians to drag everyone else down. Until presidents and members of Congress begin to honor their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, they deserve all the distrust and disdain they receive. Americans need less faith in democracy and more faith in their own liberty.

Author: James Bovard.

The Three Major Reasons Why Representative Democracy Will Fail, And The Combined Solution.

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In representative democracies, voters ostensibly control the state through the politicians they vote for. However, most representative democracies fall far short of this goal. Three of the reasons for the trouble are the problems of scale, bundling, and omission. I will explore these three problems below and argue that privatization and decentralization can ameliorate them.

Scale

The viability of meaningful political representation withers as the ratio of representatives to voters decreases. There are 435 members in the House of Representatives in a country of 328 million people. This means that each member “represents” an average of 755,000 people. How exactly does one person represent the federal legislative preferences of 755,000 diverse people? How do two senators embody the will of 600,000 Wyomingites, let alone all the Californians and Texans? Scale alone renders American democracy to a great extent meaningless, and yet this is almost never talked about.

Bundling

The second problem with representative democracy is the issue known as “bundling.” Suppose candidate Smith is running against candidate Jones. Smith has his policies, and Jones has his. But what if you, the voter, like some of Smith’s policies and some of Jones’s? There is no picking and choosing Smith’s position on issue X and Jones’s position on issue Y as there is at a buffet or at the supermarket (market institutions). We’re left with rigid, take-it-or-leave-it, package deals.  Walter Block contrasts the flexibility of the market with ham-fisted democracy:

The dollar vote occurs every day, the ballot box vote only every two or four years. The former may be applied narrowly, to a single product (e.g., the Edsel) while the latter is a “package deal,” an all or none proposition for one candidate or the other. That is, there was no way to register approval of Bush’s policies in areas 1, 3, 5 and 7, and for Clinton in 2, 4, 6, and 8. People were limited to choosing one or the other in the last presidential election.

In society outside the state (the market), no one can force you to pay for something you don’t want, or to go without something you’re willing to pay for. And the free rider problem has been addressed here.

Omission

The third problem can be called “omission.” Presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional elections typically revolve around only a handful of issues. But the state intervenes in nearly every aspect of our lives. If candidate Smith and candidate Jones spend their campaigns battling it out over, say, the income tax rate, environmental regulation, and school vouchers, who will “represent” the voters who care about the central bank, the welfare state, foreign policy, the debt, etc.?

Whenever the candidates agree on or simply ignore issues, as is necessarily the case for the vast majority of issues at stake in any given election, voting is largely useless in affecting these issues. At best, the citizen can vote for the candidate they hope will better address the ignored topic (in the event that it is addressed at all).

The problem of omission doesn’t just apply to controversial policies shunned by the bipartisan establishment. It applies to topics simply not interesting enough to be prominent on the campaign trail: volumes of arcane regulation, obscure federal agencies, military bases people don’t know exist in countries they’ve never heard of, etc.

What Is to Be Done? Privatization.

Notice how none of the above critiques mention lobbying, fraud, or corruption. Even if representative democracy were squeaky clean, it would be a mess. Then, what is to be done?

The first solution is privatization. Functions, resources, and perceived moral authority currently held by the state can instead be distributed among its competing institutions: the nuclear family, the extended family, the church, businesses, fraternal organizations, private schools and universities, clubs, charities, etc.

The critical difference is that adults only participate in these institutions voluntarily and to the extent that they choose to, in contrast to their interactions with the state (i.e., taxation, conscription). This freedom of association encourages detailed responsiveness on the part of these organizations toward the people who finance and sustain them.

Decentralization

Additionally, decentralization can ameliorate the unresponsiveness of the state by increasing accountability. The smaller (both in terms of geographic area and population) and more numerous the political units, the greater extent to which the rulers and the ruled are in the same boat.

If the political and bureaucratic decisions of Springfield are made by people living in DC, the decision-makers don’t need to live with the consequences of their own decisions to the same extent. But if all of Springfield’s political decisions are made in Springfield, the politicians and bureaucrats will have to lie in whatever bed they make. To a greater extent, if the rulers want to live well, their subjects have to live well.

Decentralization doesn’t just increase accountability. When a political unit is geographically smaller and less populous, the people within it are more likely to have similar worldviews, cultures, religions, languages, etc.

Where there are mosaics of many tiny states, each state can be closely tailored to the particular preferences of each locality without forcing distant and different peoples to live under the same rule. In contrast, enormous political units, by their sheer expansiveness, are more likely to encompass various bitterly opposed camps who will vie for zero-sum control of the same state apparatus.

Privatization and decentralization offer liberty, accountability, and harmony where the state offers phony representation and compulsion.

Gor Mkrtchian is a research assistant at the Free Market Institute and a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. This article first appeared at mises.org.

A Thoughtless Immigration Policy Leads To A Society That No Longer Believes In Its Own Traditional Values.

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“Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years,” say researchers at the University of Cambridge. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.”

No wonder. Certainly, America is a severely divided country. “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule,” argues Donald L. Horowitz, a scholar of democracy, at Duke University.

Having studied “constitutional engineering” in divided societies like South Africa, Horowitz has concluded,

In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity.

The Democratic Party has morphed into such a political organ. It’s responding to the fact that minorities in the United States will soon form a majority. This rising majority, as polling trends indicate, will speak in one political voice, for most immigrants to the United States are not from Europe and Canada, but from Latin America and Asia, south and east. And this cohort of immigrants is reliably progressive: It votes Democratic.

Likewise, the poor and the unskilled are well-represented among our country’s immigrant intake. It’s the way we roll. Poor immigrants favor the rearranging of the income curve in their new home.

The policy establishment preaches well-meaning pieties. Our ruling idiocracy, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, claims that all these energetically imported, fractious minorities will relinquish race and tribe as unifying principles, and adopt our U.S. constitutional design and “our values.”

Democrats know better. Oh, the founding population, they expect, naïvely will hitch its existential survival to a political dispensation called liberal democracy.

The duped, historic majority of the United States willingly will cede political and institutional dominance in return for the constitutional safeguards—for the abstractions—offered by democracy. This, Democrats know only too well.

Moreover, being pushover-passive on matters domestic, many legacy Americans are generally pro-immigration, the more exotic and culturally incongruent, the better. It gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling about ourselves. But while Americans don’t see race; the people they’re importing see nothing but race.

Take Indian-Americans. They’re a relatively new addition to the United States’ top-down, state-planned, multicultural mess of pottage. Most Indian-Americans have “arrived in America over the past two decades.” But they are highly aggressive politically and reliably Democrat.

By the Economist’s telling, “Capitol Hill, for example, is crammed with staff and interns of Indian-American heritage. They also appear to be ‘over-represented’ in academia, the media and other influential posts.” And, it is their indisputable habit to deploy and grow “informal networks, as well-connected Indian-Americans find jobs for each other’s offspring.”

Caste and ethnicity: It’s what the scrupulously candid English magazine is here hinting at, ever so genteelly. As many in the corporate world know all too well—once an individual of South-Asian descent gets into a position of power, he is inclined to hire others of the same persuasion, talent be damned. Meek Anglo-Americans, on the other hand, hire by talent, not by tribe. They don’t seem to have that screw-or-be-screwed DNA to do battle with such flinty duplicity.

This mercenary, extractive approach to politics prevails among the immigrants being imported at a furious rate by the immigration-industrial-complex. Asians, aforementioned, are especially primed to seek, and aggressively extract, advantage from positions of power.

Take Kamala Harris. Although she “rarely mentioned the Indian side of her family while campaigning,” the senator’s mother migrated to California from Chennai, in southern India. Angry, anti-white, and highly receptive to theories that blacken the West and porcelainize the undeveloped world—Kamala and those who share her way of thinking cannot be trusted to relinquish race as an organizing principle, in favor of a complete commitment to a constitutional design, in the America she and her progeny hope to inherit.

What about that seething Somali, Ilhan Omar, the representative from Minnesota? Who will be the loser in her brave, new, tribal America?

In the context of democracy and its discontents, Anglo-American elites and policymakers have courted and engineered their own demise. No other group expresses such incontinent exhilaration at the prospects of turning their historic populations into minorities.

“The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world,” states Pew Research. “Immigrants and their U.S.-born children now number approximately 89.4 million people, or 28 percent of the overall U.S. population,” says the American Community Survey (ACS). According to the Migration Policy Institute, “One in seven U.S. residents is foreign-born.”

As stated, the foreign-born are, for the most part, from alien, often-hostile cultures.

“A century ago, more than 80 percent of [America’s] foreign-born population came from Europe; now the figure is only 10 percent. . . . America is becoming less European,” bewailed the Economist in one issue, inexplicably.

“Inexplicably,” because this (superb) news magazine usually glorifies the ethnic transformation of European societies through exotic immigration.

Confusion born of contradictions peaks in the next issue, where Robert Guest, of the same open-borders Economist, lectures and laments that, “The simplest way to make the world richer is to allow more people to move. Yet the politics of migration has never been more toxic.”

D’oh! While extolling endless migration to the West, the very same, November 16th-22 issue of the magazine depicts a world beset by unrest:

It is hard to keep up with the protest movements under way around the world. … only the global unrest of the late 1960s was similar in scope.

After much dissembling, it is eventually conceded that the global unrest is engulfing “well-functioning democracies” big time, too.

In fact, “a related phenomenon [in the unrest equation] is the weakening of the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy—that losers, who may represent a majority of the popular vote, will accept rule by the winners until the next election. The millions on the streets do not accept the patience that trade-off demands.” (Emphasis added.)

“A weakening of the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy”? I wonder why?

Because flooding western democracies with non-western people has created societies without social capital; societies that share no enduring bonds other than the quest to extract as much power and possessions possible from the political process.

Western nation-states are now imperiled entities. Their central authorities have worked to erode delicate sectarian and ethnic balance within, and thus hope for lasting comity among disparate communities.

By using their police powers to swamp their already fractious populations with alien nations—where are the referenda on mass immigration?—governments have undermined existing ethnic balance in western democracies, and, with it, the fellow feeling so essential to democracy’s endurance.

Consider: Before Comrade Ted Kennedy’s coup of 1965, America was, by and large, a biracial nation. To quote author Ann Coulter, “From 1620 to 1970, the U.S. was demographically stable. . . . The country was about 85 percent to 90 percent white, almost entirely British, German, French and Dutch, and 10 percent to 15 percent African American.” In other words, America was largely a biracial compact; never a multicultural “nation of immigrants.”

Blacks and whites were only just beginning to come to terms with each other and with a shared, painful past.

Arguably, by opening the floodgates to mass, Third-World immigrants, the government of the day forever upset the teetering biracial balance within America.

Why “One Man, One Vote” Is A Bad Way To Run A Democracy In Our Federal Republic.

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The US Senate is increasingly targeted by left-wing think tanks and legislators for the fact it is based on “voter inequality.” According to critics, the Senate ensures small states are “overrepresented,”and the body favors voters in smaller and more sparsely populated states. In contrast, reformers hold up the concept of “one man, one vote” as an ideal and a solution.

“One man, one vote” is not a clearly defined concept, but it is often used to oppose legislative schemes used in federal political systems.  Among these schemes is the US Senate in which each state is given an equal vote so as to balance out the interests of small states against the interests of large states. Large states, of course, dominate legislatures in population-based representation systems like that used in the US House of Representatives.

The US is not alone in using such measures. The Australian Senate, for example, allots twelve members to each state. The Senate of Canada is composed of appointed members who represent regions rather than individual provinces. Regional representation is not based on population size as in the House of Commons. In the Swiss Council of States, each canton is represented by two members, regardless of size.

Non-population-based methods can be used in elections as well. The American electoral college system is one example. Another example is the Swiss method of “double majority,” in which some legislation requires approval by both the overall Swiss population (using a “one man, one vote” principle) and also by a majority vote in a majority of the cantons.

Naturally, systems like these give power to a relatively small number of voters from small cantons or states to exercise a veto in the election. For example, if a double majority system were employed in US presidential elections, a president could win an overwhelming majority in the popular vote, but be defeated by a coalition of small-state voters who are able to deny the needed majorities from twenty-six of the fifty states.

Those who support “one man, one vote” oppose this sort of thing because they think straight-up majorities should have the final say in every legislative matter.

Why Big and Powerful States and Regions Must Be Restrained

Switzerland, however, provides us insights into why simple majorities tend to be a problem. The Swiss confederation is a makeshift conglomeration of regions and cities with varying interests depending on the linguistic, religious, and cultural preferences of the population in each area. Some areas are Catholic and some are Protestant. Some areas are French-speaking, and other areas are German or Italian speaking.

These differences were even more significant in the past, so the confederation was designed with some anti-majoritarian measures to prevent any small number of highly populated regions from steamrolling over the rest of the country. If, say, the German-speaking cantons became very populous, then a system based on rank majority vote would mean that the German-speakers could ram their preferences down the throats of everyone else. The same might be said if one religious group gained a majority.

What the “one man, one vote” advocates would have us believe, however, is that there is no need to balance these interests. In their view, if there are more pro-French voters in Switzerland, than so be it: everyone must now do what the French-speaking majority says.

Applied to the US, we see this frequently pushed by progressives: the federalist measures designed to provide additional voting power to smaller states are denounced as “undemocratic” and we’re told that if Californians and New Yorkers have an overwhelming number of votes, then that’s just tough luck for everyone else. The minority must do what the majority says, even if those people have very different interests from the majorities in New York or California.

The way the Left shunts this argument aside is by insisting that there aren’t any real differences between people in, say, South Dakota, and people in New Jersey. If there are differences, it is because people are South Dakota are intellectual troglodytes and their opinions shouldn’t matter. This problem is solved by forcing “one man, one vote” on everyone so that South Dakotans’ unacceptable political views are neutralized by far larger majorities in faraway cities.

Historically, such claims would have been regarded as ridiculous. No one denied that there were significant cultural differences between the Pietists of New England and the Catholics and Lutherans of the Great Lakes region.  Even setting aside religious or ethnic differences, various regions of the nation had very different economic needs depending on what industries—agricultural, maritime, or manufacturing—were dominant in the region. It was recognized that agricultural areas ought to be able to offer legislative resistance to new laws designed to favor manufacturers at the expense of farmers.  In case an accident of history occurred by which one group became more populous than the other, many thought it would be prudent to put safeguards in place to prevent one region from dominating the other.

Cultural differences, of course, have been historically undeniable in Switzerland. Although there has been cultural convergence in recent decades, few would suggest that Italian-speaking Catholics in the south agree with northern German Protestants on all important matters. Differences are real, and a healthy respect for self-determination and human rights suggests that local cultures ought not be subject to the will of a distant majority.

Chinese Voters Would Out-Vote Everybody

This fundamental principle can be more easily illustrated in a hypothetical confederation with China as a member.

Suppose that in twenty years, some groups of elites in eastern Asia suggest it would be a great idea to form a confederation of states from the region: the United States of East Asia (USEA). It would include China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia. This new union could be put together to facilitate free trade, free migration, and to generally increase economic prosperity and peaceful multilateralism.

How should the governance of this organization be organized?

Using a unicameral legislature predicated on “one man, one vote” presents an obvious problem: the Chinese would obviously out-vote all the other countries on a regular basis. Even if South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan all voted together as a block, their relatively small population sizes could not possibly allow them to veto pro-China measures pushed by a majority of Chinese voters. Because of China’s size, any other members of the confederation would quickly realize that the USEA was really just a union dominated by China most of the time.

On the other hand, a remedy could lie in creating requirements for double majorities or in assigning equal representation to all members in a senate. This would moderate China’s power. If these steps were taken, though, the “one man, one vote party” advocates would object and insist that China’s dominance is perfectly fine because all the voters deserve equal representation and it would be “unfair” to give Japanese voters the same number of votes in the USEA senate as China. Chinese voters would be disenfranchised!

Moreover, the “one man, one vote” advocates—were they to use the same arguments used in the US—would claim that if the people of Japan and Indonesia are unwilling to live by “the will of the majority” among “all voters” in the USEA, it just illustrates how backward and undemocratic those Japanese and Indonesians are. “Democracy,” we’d be told, demands that every voter, whether Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese must count equally.

Clearly, such a situation would quickly lead to the dissolution of the USEA, whether peacefully or through violence.

Yes, it’s true that the cultural differences between people in New York and people in Utah are not as stark as the differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. But the fundamental principles behind the need for federalism in the USEA and in the USA are the same.

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute, where this article foirst appeared.

There’s No Such Thing As The People Or The Will Of The People.

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Among the most important advances in the social sciences of the 20th century is Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. The full explanation of this theorem first appeared in Arrow’s 1951 book, Social Choice and Individual Values. As explanations go, this one is especially beautiful in its rigor, yet highly technical and inaccessible to the general public. But it can be summarized well-enough: Arrow proved that a collection of people has no “will” in the way that we understand each individual person to have a will.

Stated more fully, Arrow proved that it’s impossible to devise any method of discovering the preferences of two or more persons and then aggregating these preferences into a single set of preferences of the sort that is possessed by each individual person.

One welcome implication today of Arrow’s Theorem is that it reaffirms our understanding that a monarch or dictator who boasts of embodying or carrying out “the will of the people” of the country is either lying or delusional. An implication far less welcome today – although one no less indisputable – is that the results of even the fairest and most-inclusive democratic decision-making procedure are not the will of the people. Indeed, these results are not even the will of the voters. Because two or more people do not share a single mind, no group of people has wants, hopes, and fears in the same way that each individual experiences these attitudes and desires.

Arrow’s proof does not discredit majority-rule democracy as an acceptable – indeed, perhaps as the best available – method for making collective decisions. If, say, the government is charged with supplying national defense, some variety of inclusive democratic decision-making is arguably the best practical means of choosing the size of the annual defense budget. Not only does each and every adult in the political community have the opportunity to register his or her preference, this procedure also ensures against the selection of options that are wildly unpopular.

All good. But the chosen outcome should not be accorded a status that it doesn’t deserve: the chosen outcome is not the will of the people. It’s simply the outcome of the collective-decision-making procedure.

“The People” Is No Person

Another way to put Arrow’s point is to say that it is a gross error to anthropomorphize a group of people, even when that group makes collective decisions according to democratic norms.

Perhaps the single best way to see why such anthropomorphization is an error is to consider what Arrow identified for each individual decision-maker as being the “irrelevance of independent alternatives.” The language here is confusingly technical, but the idea is not – as revealed by this example that I steal from a lecture given a few years ago by my colleague Alex Tabarrok.

Suppose that you have a hankering for a scoop of ice cream. To satisfy this hankering, you stroll into a diner and ask the waiter what flavors of ice cream are available. The waiter replies, “We have vanilla and chocolate.” You weigh these two options for a moment and then tell the waiter, “Please give me a scoop of vanilla.” But just as the waiter is about to serve the vanilla to you, he says, “Oh, I almost forgot. We also have strawberry ice cream.”

How would you, a rational individual, respond upon learning of this additional alternative? You might respond by saying, “Wonderful! I love strawberry! Give me a scoop of strawberry instead.” If you respond in this way, no one would think you odd.

But suppose that you instead respond by telling the waiter, “Oh, now that I know that strawberry is also an option, please change my order from vanilla to chocolate.” If you respond in this way, everyone would think you to be crazy-odd. Normal – “rational” – individuals don’t react in such a manner. An individual who prefers vanilla to chocolate does not come to prefer chocolate to vanilla upon learning of the availability of strawberry.

Yet in political elections such ‘preference shifting’ is neither unusual nor an indication of irrational or otherwise inexplicable behavior on the part of anyone.

For example, it’s quite possible that Ross Perot’s 1992 candidacy for the U.S. presidency – by taking more popular votes from Pres. George H.W. Bush than from Gov. Bill Clinton – swung the election from Bush to Clinton. If the American people were a creature with a will – if the American people were a giant sentient being – it’s as if this creature walked into a polling place in November 1992 and asked “What presidential options do you have?” Upon being told “Bush and Clinton,” this American People creature replied, “Give me a Bush!” But then upon learning that there is available also a Perot, the creature changed its mind and said, “Oh, well in that case, give me a Clinton!”

No rational being behaves in such a way.

There’s disagreement over Perot’s effect on the outcome of the ’92 election. But whether or not he did or didn’t swing that election to Clinton is here not the point. The point is that in fact such electoral outcomes in reality are often quite likely and not considered to be odd or inexplicable. Yet because no individual acts in such a way, electoral outcomes are not properly to be reckoned as the choices of a rational creature with a will – as a rational creature called “the people.”

It’s fair to suspect that I’m making too big a deal about not calling the outcome of any election “the will of the people.” But I insist. To talk of a “will of the people” is to imply the existence of a creature who is greater than each of the individuals who comprise ‘the people’ – a creature to which each individual’s will and well-being are subservient. It’s the tiniest of steps from a belief in such a creature to the conviction that no individual is an end in himself or herself but is, instead, merely a means to serve this creature. And from this false belief in such a higher-order creature, all manner of tyranny has ensued.

Humanity owes thanks to Kenneth Arrow for proving the non-existence of such a creature as the will of “the people.”

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research. This article first appeared at AIER.org

Unlike Democratic Voting, Markets Give You A Genuine Say.

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Peter Earle eloquently exploded the notion that voting in political elections is an exalted means of self-expression. Few myths are more lethal to liberty than that which equates freedom with majoritarian democracy – and no fallacy does more to fuel this myth than that which declares the essence of freedom to be the right to vote.

In reality, voting is an extraordinarily skimpy and muted means of giving voice to your individual values, hopes, concerns, and preferences. And the right to vote is certainly no great bulwark to protect your liberty.

Bondage by the Majority is Bondage Nevertheless

Nearly all people, regardless of their political and ideological stripes, vigorously reject this conclusion about voting. Even you, dear reader, likely resist it. Yet its truth cannot seriously be contested. In what meaningful way is your freedom protected if, as a result of an election in which you vote, 51 percent of your fellow citizens cast their ballots for a candidate who promises to raise your taxes against your will, to forcibly obstruct your ability to buy imports, and to prevent your teenaged daughter from competing for a summer job by offering to work at an hourly wage below the state-imposed minimum?

The fact that you were among the thousands or millions who cast a ballot in this election does nothing to make you more free than you would be had you not voted or had these impositions been foisted on you by a monarch.

The typical response to my observation goes something like this: “But at least each voter had a say!” To which I reply “Say what? What say?”

A Say that’s Virtually Silent

It’s true that you cast a ballot and that your vote was counted. But your vote – your “say” – was only the faintest of muffled whispers. If you voted for the losing candidate, your request for government not to intrude into your life in the ways promised by the victorious candidate is ignored. You must obey the commands that will now issue from the state. And these commands silence the very real say that you and your family would otherwise have had in the market.

With more of your income taxed away and with customs agents blocking your access to imports, you have less of a say in how your earnings are spent. With your daughter unable to offer to work for a wage below the state-imposed minimum, she has less of a say in choosing the kind of job she holds and in the specific terms of her employment.

Notice that the say that you have in the market is always real and effective. Unlike in political elections, if you prefer to dine this evening at a Japanese restaurant rather than at an Italian restaurant, you will dine at a Japanese restaurant. No one overrides or ignores your choice. And you don’t have to spend precious time and energy convincing a majority of your fellow citizens to expressly give you permission to dine at the restaurant of your choice.

Notice also that your say in the market is more articulate than is your say in political elections. By voluntarily spending your money on the spicy-roll combo, the signal that you send is precise and clear: this evening you want the spicy-roll combo and not any of the many other menu items. In contrast, by voting for candidate Smith rather than candidate Jones, the signal that you send is cloudy. Did you vote for Smith because of her opposition to tariffs or in spite of her opposition to tariffs? No one other than you – and certainly not Smith – knows.

Or perhaps you voted not so much for Smith as against Jones, whose promise to raise the minimum wage intensely frightens you. But if Smith wins, you and other voters get not only her opposition to raising the minimum wage – a policy position that you favor – you also get Smith’s policy positions on countless other issues, not all of which you support. Voting at best allows you to express your opinion about which candidate you prefer; it does not allow you to express your opinion on each of the many different individual issues that are at stake.

Preference-intensity Is Real and Important

Nor does voting allow you to express your preferences’ intensities. If you vote for Smith rather than Jones, you tell the world only that you prefer Smith to Jones. Your vote says nothing about how much you prefer Smith to Jones. Your preference for Smith over Jones might be intense or it might be tiny. Whatever it is, your vote doesn’t say.

The failure of voting to give voice to the intensity of each voter’s preferences is significant. Suppose that Smith wins 51 percent of the votes to Jones’s 49 percent. Suppose also that nearly everyone who voted for Smith has only a slight preference for Smith, but that nearly everyone who voted for Jones intensely prefers Jones to Smith. Is it then the case that Smith is the people’s preferred candidate? The correct answer isn’t obvious.

In your everyday life you of course experience the rank-ordering of your preferences – for example, you prefer to drive an SUV rather than a sedan. But you also experience the intensity with which you hold your preferences – your preference for an SUV over a sedan can range from enormous to negligible. And in everyday life you can express the intensity with which you hold your preferences – say, by willingly paying a much higher price for the SUV if your preference for that vehicle over the sedan is high.

In our one-person-one-vote system, you have no comparable ability to express the intensity of your preference for candidate Smith over candidate Jones. Your vote is mute about the intensity of your preferences.

Your Say in Markets Is Taken Much More Seriously than Is Your Say in Elections

My argument here is not that you should not vote. Rather, my argument is that you should not be duped into believing that voting is either the essential exercise of freedom or that the ‘voice’ you have at the polling place is remotely as clear, as loud, or as effective as is the ‘voice’ you have in the market and in other private spheres. If more people understood this reality, surely there would be less enthusiasm among those of us who live in democracies for giving to the state ever more power over our lives.

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