Democracy: Structural defects

When a person thinks about the idea of a stateless society, it's natural that they do so in relation to a political order they have firsthand experience of: a representative democracy. Usually, there's a widespread belief that although this kind of democracy isn't perfect, it works pretty well and the basics are sound. Against this background belief, advocating for a stateless society, which is strange and unfamiliar, can seem like wanting to fix something that isn't broken.

The purpose of this video is to show why it's not acceptable to assume that representative democracy is a viable and sustainable option. There are, in fact, reasons to believe that representative democracy has inherent structural problems that make it unsustainable.

So, the first item: the cost of becoming a well-informed voter is too high relative to the expected benefit of becoming one. The chance of a vote in the presidential election in the US being decisive—in other words, making a difference—is something like one in 10 million, and that's for a swing state. The odds get even worse for other states. The cost of becoming what we might call well-informed about what you're voting for is fairly high; it involves lots of research, it's an ongoing project, and in many cases, it also requires the study and understanding of an alien discipline, which is economics.

Even if you were well-informed—if we could agree that a person was well-informed—and even if the person's vote happened to be decisive, if it was that one in 10 million, the promises of candidates are not binding anyway. So, the incentive to cast a well-informed vote drops even further. As far as the goal of changing government is concerned, given the vanishingly small likelihood of your vote making a difference in the way you hope it will, it's just not worth the trouble to spend all the time and energy required to become a well-informed voter.

People do vote, of course, but we can't expect the vast majority to be well-informed in the relevant sense; it's just not worth their time. Instead, voters in general can be expected to vote based on a very superficial consideration of the most prominent policy promises, and they can be expected to go for the set of promises with the highest psychic gain—that is, the promises that make them feel the best.

So, the idea that electoral democracy can ever be representative in the sense of reflecting the will of the people in a meaningful way is a fantasy.

Two: imbalanced incentives mean that minorities will parasitize the majority. Special interest groups lobby governments to enact policies that favor the group, and the favored groups don't much care whether their benefit is bought at the expense of everyone else. So often, it will be because the benefits of these policy changes are concentrated to the lobby group while the costs of these changes are distributed among everyone else.

Any individual harmed by the policy has only a very weak incentive to take any kind of action to oppose the harmful policy, and meanwhile, the lobby group has a very strong incentive to try and maintain the harmful policy. To illustrate this, imagine that a milk producer has successfully lobbied to get the state to pass legislation that guarantees itself an extra million dollars per year. But this also raises the cost of all milk products by 2 cents.

Although this law goes against the interests of the people, it's extremely unlikely that any individual or group of individuals is going to be motivated enough to do anything about it because 2 cents isn't much on each purchase. By contrast, if the law were ever to be challenged, the milk firm will be prepared to spend millions on legal action, on press campaigns, on bribes, etc., in order to maintain its privilege. Over time, there's reason to expect that there will be an accumulation of legislation that benefits special interest groups at the expense of everyone else.

Democracy can be expected to create a situation in which minority elites subtly parasitize the majority.

Three: we can expect an increasingly harmful free rider problem. Benjamin Franklin once said, "Once the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the Republic." The democratic state allows politicians to promise voters other people's money and for voters to vote for that money. While this is the case, the result can be expected to be a growing number of free riders and a shrinking productive class. The ultimate result of this trend will be that the productive class is no longer able to carry the parasitic classes, and some kind of collapse will follow.

Four: rism and democracy are likely to deplete resources rather than plan for the future. As Hans Hermann Hoppe pointed out, monarchs used to be owners of the nations they ruled in the full sense; they could sell off parts of their kingdom, or they could leave their kingdom to their heirs. By contrast, democratically elected rulers are caretakers rather than owners. They can't sell off parts of the state for personal gain, and they can't leave it to their children.

While monarchs were incentivized to take a long-term view when it comes to maintaining the economic health of their kingdom and their property, the democratic caretakers know that they only have a couple of years to profit from their position of power. So, they can be expected to be far more likely to pursue policies that deplete the country's resources for short-term gain.

Also, voters tend not to understand economics, and so are predisposed to associate the symptoms of economic damage with whoever is in power at the time that the symptoms manifest themselves. So, the temptation will always be for politicians to adopt a kind of "hair of the dog" approach—to suppress symptoms of economic problems by deferring the pain until later. Often, this will be done by printing more money or issuing more credit, in the knowledge that they'll no longer be in office when the inevitable hangover finally arrives.

So, representative democracy has several serious structural problems, and it is important to bear these in mind when considering whether an alternative order will be preferable.