The Fundamental Brokenness of Democracy

Representative democracy, the political system, is broken. Not broken as in 'We don't have enough democracy!' or broken as in 'Democracy is giving bad outcomes right now'.

Democracy systematically gives sub-optimal outcomes that get worse over time

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 first-hand experience of, a representative democracy. There’s a widespread belief that although democracy isn’t perfect, it works pretty well, and the basics are sound. Against this background belief, advocating a stateless society which is strange and unfamiliar can seem like wanting to fix something that isn’t broken.

The purpose of this text is to show why it’s not acceptable to assume that representative democracy is a viable, sustainable option. And that there’s reason to believe that it has inherent structural problems that make it unsustainable. I deliberately avoid consideration of whether state democracy is a morally acceptable system here.

1. The cost of becoming a well-informed voter is too high relative to the expected benefit

The chance of a vote in the presidential election in the US being decisive is something like 1 in 10 million, that’s for a swing state. The cost of becoming what we might call ‘well informed’ about what you’re voting for is fairly high: involves lots of research, and in many cases it also requires the study and understanding of an alien discipline: economics. Even if you were well informed, and your vote was decisive, the promises of candidates are not binding anyway so the incentive to cast a well infrmed vote drops even further.

So 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, 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 go for the set with the highest psychic gain: the promises that make them feel good. 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.

Here's a video I produced for Learn Liberty with more on this subject:

2. Imbalanced incentives mean that minorities will parasitise the majority

Special interest groups lobby governments to enact policies that favour the group. The favoured groups won’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, but the costs are widely 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, while the lobby group has a very strong incentive to try to maintain the harmful policy.

By way of illustration. Imagine that a milk producer had successfully lobbied to get the state to pass legislation that guaranteed itself an extra million dollars per year, but this also raised 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 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 would be prepared to spend millions on legal action, press campaigns, bribes etc, in order to maintain its privilege.

Over time then, we can expect there to 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 parasitise the majority.

3. We can expect an increasingly harmful free-rider problem

Benjamin Franklin:

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 will be that the productive class will no longer be able to carry the parasitic classes, and some kind of collapse will follow.

4. Rulers in a 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 kingdoms, they could leave their kingdoms 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 are incentivised to take a long-term view when in comes to maintaining the economic health of their kingdom, because it’s their property, the caretakers know that they have only 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 countries 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 they manifest. So the temptation will always be for those in power to adopt the hair of the dog approach, suppressing symptoms of economic problems by deferring the pain until later, for instance 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.

Representative democracy has several serious structural problems. And it’s important to bear these in mind when considering whether an alternative order would be preferable.

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This post is based on an article I originally published here: http://georgeoughttohelp.tumblr.com/post/4419075631/democracy-is-broken

Other stuff I posted that you might like
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I'm Tomasz Kaye. I made George Ought To Help and other pro-liberty propaganda films. You can support my work on Patreon.com.