DEMOCRATS and Republicans alike are constantly prattling away about the amazing wonders of American-style democratic government, like infatuated school girls with a hunky crush. As voting time draws near, this annoyance has reached a fevered pitch. As is the case with most things that are popular in the political arena today, democracy is a hideous abhorrence. As a form of government, the best that can be said for it is that it is the least awful out of a field of horrible alternatives, all of which deserve a healthy dose of contempt from any reasonable person who cares the least bit about justice.
Almost universally, democraphobes espouse the strange idea that majoritarian rule lends some type of moral legitimacy to government. This is utterly and demonstrably insane. The question of whether or not a government is democratic has little or nothing to do with whether the laws and actions of that government are just. The laws of a democratic government apply to the entire population, while they are decided by only some majority or plurality of that population. Thus to the extent that the majority rules, the minority is susceptible to unbridled tyranny, which is made no less tyrannical by the fact that it comes with the sanction of the majority. Using common sense, matters of justice aren't determined by popularity. Think of a democratic government in a population with a majority of slave-owners, or of Nazis, or of Taliban-like fundamentalists. As such examples clearly show, popular support for government policies doesn't make these policies right.
But democracy does not just miserably fail to ensure that a government will act justly. In fact, it often encourages blatant injustice. This is abundantly clear in those cases in which exploitative majorities take advantage of the legal system to trample the rights of political minorities, and then cloak themselves in the false legitimacy of majoritarian rule. But even beyond this, selfish factions and special interest groups are naturally motivated to hijack the massive power of the state in order to exploit their fellow citizens.
The exploitative nature of democracy is facilitated by the mechanism of diffuse costs and concentrated benefits, in which well-motivated groups provide electoral support to representatives in exchange for government handouts. When the cost of any one of these handouts is spread out across the entire tax-paying population, it requires only the tiniest amount of taxes per citizen. As a result, no single one of these handouts costs anybody enough to be worth complaining about. This is especially true when most people see a chance to receive some handouts of their own. These handouts naturally tend to multiply as they are convenient ways for representatives to garner popular support. Thus eventually, all or most voters feel like they are getting something for nothing, and everybody delights in the unacknowledged process of scrambling to exploit everybody else. Few realize that, along with the gross administrative expenses of government, the total combined cost of various handouts ends up costing most people much more than they ever would be willing to pay for the concentrated benefits they receive from the state.
Even worse, the perverse irony here is that even if citizens realize this bilking is going on, there's nothing they can do to stop it, and so they have a very strong incentive to continue participating in it. If you are going to get taxed no matter what, you might as well try to extract all the benefits you can from the ever-expanding government feeding trough. All the while, this parasitic cycle sustains itself by gradually gnawing away at society's productivity.
But what could we possibly do to prevent these plagues of democracy? The obvious answer is to establish and honor a constitutional framework that strictly limits the functions of government and protects individual rights, so that the brute power of the state can't be hijacked and abused by special interests or influential voting blocks. Of course, our founding fathers did this, but the soul of their project has been slowly degrading under popular pressure ever since.
The task falls to the living to implement some practical conception of which functions of government are legitimate. We all have our own opinions, but ultimately what is the acceptable alternative to voting directly or electing representatives to deal with this question? We might not have a viable one, and some form of popular rule might therefore be the best that we can do. Government is a filthy endeavor that attracts the most arrogant and selfish megalomaniacs that society has to offer, and then makes them worse by steadily corrupting them. Please, for the sake of sanity, can everybody just stop acting like they enjoy the process so much?
Anthony Dick's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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