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Posts Tagged ‘Democracy’

It’s Been Morphed into a ‘Democracy,’ So What Else Would You Expect? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 9, 2021

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/01/l-reichard-white/its-been-morphed-into-a-democracy-so-what-else-would-you-expect/

Democracy, n. “A government of the masses. …Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic – negating property rights. …Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.” –War Department Training Manual TM_2000-25 issued November 30, 1928

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” –James Madison, Federalist Paper 10

All democracies turn into dictatorships — but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea … ” –filmmaker George Lucas, Dark Victory from time.com

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Democrats and Media Abandon Democracy – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on November 24, 2020

Matthew Brann, a federal district judge appointed by Obama, refused to accept Giuliani’s lawsuit against the Pennsylvania election fraud.  The judge was not content to deny the case a hearing.  He used the occasion for a propaganda attack, demonizing the lawsuit, based on affidavits from witnesses who signed under penalty of perjury, as “speculative accusations unsupported by evidence.”  The judge knows full well that affidavits are always evidence. 

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/11/23/democrats-and-media-abandon-democracy/

Paul Craig Roberts

Michigan State Attorney General Dana Nessel has attributes of a Nazi.  She, like Washington Post columnist Randall D. Eliason, wants to falsely prosecute attorneys who represent those making challenges to the election. She also wants to prosecute election officials who refuse to certify until irregularities are properly dealt with, and she wants to prosecute Pennsylvania Republican state officials who met with Trump at the White House. In other words, Dana Nessel has proved herself unfit for any public office by her effort to weaponize law for her political agenda.

George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley discusses Dana Nessel’s attempt to coerce Republicans by threatening them with indictments. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/michigan-ag-calls-criminal-charges-against-gop-certifiers-who-wont-fall-line?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter 

Matthew Brann, a federal district judge appointed by Obama, refused to accept Giuliani’s lawsuit against the Pennsylvania election fraud.  The judge was not content to deny the case a hearing.  He used the occasion for a propaganda attack, demonizing the lawsuit, based on affidavits from witnesses who signed under penalty of perjury, as “speculative accusations unsupported by evidence.”  The judge knows full well that affidavits are always evidence.  So we now have an Obama federal judge who for political purpose pretends to be thoroughly ignorant of law and not know that affidavits signed under penalty of perjury are always evidence.

 The presstitutes are not interested in Brann’s extraordinary pretense of utter ignorance, which if true would disqualify him as a judge.  Instead they are using his ignorant pronouncement as “proof” that the legal team has no evidence. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/pennsylvania-judge-throws-out-trump-campaign-lawsuit?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter 

Democrats, who share Dana Nessel’s determination to weaponize law and destroy democracy, are pushing Biden, if he becomes president, to prosecute Trump and his supporters.  Rep. Bill Pascrell, Democrat from New Jersey, declared that “Donald Trump along with his worst enablers must be tried for their crimes against our nation and Constitution.”  If this sounds like a South American banana republic, that is what the Democrats are turning us into. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/526978-biden-faces-politically-thorny-decision-on-trump-prosecutions 

Attempting to prosecute Trump, of course, is what the Democrats have been doing for four years with Russiagate and Impeachgate without any evidence.  Clearly, the Democrats envison a one-party state under them in which the abuse of law for political purpose to which they are giving birth cannot, in turn, be used against them.  The Democrats are greasing the skids for America to become the most corrupt country on earth.  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/11/22/the-dnc-an-american-politburo/ 

The New York Times has scaled new heights in Reality Denial. 

For several years the World Economic Forum, an elite organization, has been hyping the need for the “Great Reset” — https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/11/19/from-freedom-to-tyranny-the-world-economic-forums-great-reset/  The Great Reset requires tremendous authoritarian power.  

The elite organization has hosted meetings, the purpose of which is to make the Reset seem inevitable, and has a book published on the Great Reset.  The appearance of Covid was used as added reason for the Reset.  

But no sooner than Klaus Schwab, a leading exponent of the Great Reset, explained it to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs— https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/klaus-schwab-great-reset-will-lead-fusion-our-physical-digital-biological-identity –than the New York Times denied the very existance of such a thing, calling it a “far-right conspiracy theory” — https://summit.news/2020/11/19/ny-times-says-great-reset-is-a-conspiracy-theory-on-same-day-world-economic-forum-celebrates-it/ 

Perhaps the NY Times’ faux journalists—they don’t have any real ones—got confused, thinking that the word was getting out on an elite plot and moved to squash knowledge of the plot, not realizing that the WEF is hyping the Reset as part of the sell.  

Alternatively, we can conclude that the NY Times’ journalists and editors are so ignorant that they are unaware of the WEF’s big agenda item.  These are the same journalists and editors who are telling us that there is no evidence of election fraud and that America was racist at birth.

Americans are faced with a so-called Democrat political party that has abandoned America’s democratic ways. Democrats have made a power grab for ideological purposes that are hostile to principles such as election integrity which is essential for democracy.  Americans are also faced with the absence of a media that serves as watchdog and reports objectively.  Without objective reporting, Americans are denied the information that democracy requires to function. Instead, the media controls explanations for the Democrats that support the Democrats’ power grab.  The picture is clear that both Democrats and media have abandoned democracy because democracy is a check on their agenda. They value their agenda more than they value democracy, and they are going to force their agenda down our throats whether we want it or not.

According to polls, a majority of Americans believe the November 3 election was stolen by the Democrats— https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/11/21/30-of-democrats-believe-democrats-stole-the-election-and-75-of-republicans-think-so/ 

If the Democrats succeed with their theft, whatever is left of public confidence in American institutions will evaporate.  After Clinton’s lies, 9/11, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assayd’s use of chemical weapons, Iranian nukes, Russian invasions, Russiagate, Impeachgate, Covid, and now a stolen presidential election, confidence in government must be close to nonexistent.  When there is no confidence raw power takes over.  If Democrats get away with their theft of the election, we will have crossed the Rubicon.  

Some say there has always been voter fraud in American elections and ask what is new this time. What is new this time is election fraud on a national level with the appearance of a plot to create a one-party state.  What is new this time is the entirety of the media in support of the party that committed the election fraud.  What is new this time is the calls for prosecution of members of the defrauded party.  What we are witnessing is not only the suppression of evidence but also the prosecution of those who present it.

Despite the evidence of election fraud, the Democrats have a good chance to succeed with their theft.  First of all, we all know that the media will not present the case against the Democrats.  The media will continue to deny that hundreds of affidavits are evidence.  Most Americans will never hear the story of the extraordinary audacity that stole a presidential election.

Second, Trump is a populist, and few populists in America have ever succeeded at the national level.  Populists are in the way of the elite who have more money and more influence.  From the media’s perspective, Trump’s majority are “deplorables”–racists and misogynists who must be overthrown.  The fact that Trump is a Republican does not mean that he has the support of the Republican Party.  Republicans have just as many feet in the establishment as Democrats have.  To the establishment Trump is an outsider and, thereby, a potential threat to their interest, just as his intention to normalize relations with Russia was seen by the military/security complex as a threat to their budget and power.

The absence of any Republican Party support for Trump is obvious in the failure of the Barr Justice Department to bring (1) any indictments against the government officials who orchestrated the Russiagate hoax and committed federal felonies, (2) any indictments against Biden and his son for the corruption evidenced in Hunter Biden’s laptop in the hands of the FBI, and (3) the lack of any Justice Department interest in obvious election fraud backed up by hundreds of affidavits.

The Republican Establishment has hung Trump out to dry and is urging him to concede.

A minority of Republican voters themselves, although they regard the election as stolen, nevertheless believe that Trump should concede and thereby preserve the undeserved reputation of “American Democracy.”  These feeble-minded people think that it is not democracy itself that is at risk, but America’s reputation.

Over the course of my life I have watched the politicization of the federal judiciary.  Judges are no longer appointed because they are competent to interpret law according to the intent of Congress and the Constitution. They are appointed according to whether they do or do not support abortion, racial and gender quotas, homosexual marriage, open borders, amnesty for immigrant-invaders, the globalist agenda, and so forth.  The American judiciary is chosen according to which party’s agendas are ascendant.  This is the way countries are destroyed.

Consider:  if federal district judge Matthew Braun truly believed that Trump’s legal team’s Pennsylvania lawsuit is invalid, the partisan judge would accept the case and let its falsity be proven in court. What better way to dispose of the charge?  That he closed the court to the case despite majority opinion of the public that the election was stolen is proof that he knows the lawsuit is grounded in evidence.  So he suppresses the case instead of trying it.

When it is not only the Democrat Party and media who don’t respect evidence but also federal courts, the basis for evidence -based law no longer exists. Instead, law is based on power.  Who has power has the law.

The country that the Democrats and media are birthing will not know justice.

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Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem Exposes a Big Problem with Democracy | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on November 4, 2020

Specifically, if we ask “Does ‘society’ think Trump is better than Biden?,” the answer is yes, because Bob and Charlie think Trump is better than Biden—they outvote Alice on that narrow question. Using majority rule, we can also conclude that “society” thinks Biden is better than Jorgensen, because Alice and Charlie outvote Bob. So since “society” thinks Trump beats Biden and Biden beats Jorgensen, for the group to be rational we would also expect “society” to think Trump beats Jorgensen. And yet, as the table indicates, on that narrow question the voters would say the opposite: Alice and Bob would vote for Jo Jo over the Donald.

https://mises.org/wire/arrows-impossibility-theorem-exposes-big-problem-democracy?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=b6b76242be-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-b6b76242be-228343965

Robert P. Murphy

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

There is arguably nothing more sacrosanct to today’s elites than “democracy”—by which they mean “a political outcome we endorse.” And yet ironically, one of the most surprising and powerful results in social choice theory, namely Kenneth Arrow’s so-called impossibility theorem, shows that even in principle there is no coherent way to aggregate individual preferences into a collective will.

In a sense, Arrow did to democracy what Kurt Gödel did to the attempts to place mathematics on an axiomatic foundation. Yet while everyone from philosophers to cognitive scientists to computer programmers cites Gödel—even when they don’t really understand what he demonstrated—hardly anyone discusses Arrow when it comes to politics. My simple and cynical explanation is that his result is so devastating that it’s hard to say anything at all in its wake. (Note that free market economists also might suffer from this problem, if we speak too glibly about the “optimality” of a market outcome.)

Why Majority Rule Doesn’t Work

Before explaining Arrow’s shocking result, let me set the table with a demonstration of why simple majority rule isn’t a viable rule for making group decisions. Suppose Alice, Bob, and Charlie have the following subjective rankings of three candidates:

murphchart.png

murph

Specifically, if we ask “Does ‘society’ think Trump is better than Biden?,” the answer is yes, because Bob and Charlie think Trump is better than Biden—they outvote Alice on that narrow question. Using majority rule, we can also conclude that “society” thinks Biden is better than Jorgensen, because Alice and Charlie outvote Bob. So since “society” thinks Trump beats Biden and Biden beats Jorgensen, for the group to be rational we would also expect “society” to think Trump beats Jorgensen. And yet, as the table indicates, on that narrow question the voters would say the opposite: Alice and Bob would vote for Jo Jo over the Donald. Now with only three voters and three possible candidates, it should be relatively simple to determine what “the group” thinks about the best candidate, right? Yet if we happen to have the political preferences shown in the table above, then simple majority rule leads to intransitivity in the social ranking.

And so we see, even with a very simple example, that there is a fundamental problem with using simple majority rule as the mechanism for aggregating individual preference rankings into a single ‘social’ ranking. To repeat, there is no guarantee that the resulting ‘social’ rankings will obey transitivity.

Besides being worrisome conceptually, intransitive rankings also suffer from the practical problem that the overall winner is dependent on the order of pairwise contests. In our example above, if the group first pitted Biden versus Trump and then had the winner face Jo Jo, then Jo Jo would win. But if instead the elites wanted Biden, they would have the voters first decide between Trump and Jo Jo, then have that winner go head to head against Sleepy Joe.

Because a robust social choice rule shouldn’t be vulnerable to such manipulation, political thinkers have known since Condorcet that majority rule isn’t the answer.

Arrow’s Approach

I don’t know if this backstory is apocryphal, but I was taught that Kenneth Arrow set out in grad school in the late 1940s/early 1950s to get rigorous in social choice theory. Economists and other formal social scientists had known there were many types of undesirable social choice procedures (or rules). Arrow, so the story goes, originally wasn’t trying to find the best one, but instead he was merely trying to weed out the obviously bad rules in order to focus attention on the pool of surviving candidate procedures.

Arrow’s framework was a generalization of our table above. Specifically, Arrow assumed there were a finite number of citizens who each had subjective rankings of the possible “states of the world,” and he further assumed that each citizen’s preferences were complete (meaning the citizen had a definite opinion on any pairwise comparison, including the possibility of being indifferent between two outcomes) and transitive.

Taking this list of citizens’ complete and transitive preference rankings, Arrow wanted a procedure that would generate a complete and transitive “social” preference ranking of the various possible “states of the world.” In order to rule out what seemed self-evidently undesirable procedures, Arrow insisted that the eligible procedures also obey the following principles:

  • Nondictatorship: there shouldn’t exist one person in society such that, no matter what everyone else says, the procedure always makes the “social” ranking identical to the one person’s preferences. To be clear, it’s fine if in any particular example of everybody’s rankings the rule just so happens to make the “social” ranking the same as Jim’s ranking. But if, no matter what Jim and everybody else preferred, the rule always made “society” agree with Jim’s personal views, then he would be a dictator in Arrow’s sense.
  • Weak Pareto optimality: if every citizen thinks outcome A is preferable to outcome B, then it better be the case that the procedure spits out the result that “society” prefers A to B.
  • Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA): this is the least intuitive of the axioms, but when you understand it, it also sounds reasonable. This criterion says that the “social” ranking of outcome A versus B should only depend on how the citizens compare A to B.

To get a sense of what Arrow is after with IIA, suppose a child is ordering ice cream at a restaurant. The waiter says, “We have vanilla or chocolate.” The child chooses vanilla. Then the waiter comes back a minute later and explains, “Sorry, I just realized we still have some strawberry ice cream as well. Would you like to change your order?” The child responds, “Yes! I’ll order chocolate instead.”

I hope the reader can see why our hypothetical child would here be exhibiting unusual choices. This is in the spirit of what the IIA criterion is prohibiting.

Arrow’s Shocking Result

To continue the story, apparently Arrow set about to prune away the possible procedures that violated any of the above criteria and ended up with…the empty set. In other words, Arrow realized that there did not exist a procedure for generating “social” preference rankings that obeyed his list of seemingly innocuous requirements.

What’s really fun is that any interested reader can see an actual proof of Arrow’s result that doesn’t rely on prior mathematical knowledge. See, for example, this version that Amartya Sen formulated. I heartily encourage the curious to give it a shot. You’ll see that it’s not based on a trick; Arrow really did demonstrate something with devastating relevance to the notion of political sovereignty.

Conclusion

As the media elites urge Americans to vote and celebrate the wonders of “democracy,” both at home and foisted by firepower around the world, always keep in mind the elephant in the room: Kenneth Arrow showed in 1951 that the entire project of social choice theory rested on quicksand. Author:

Contact Robert P. Murphy

Robert P. Murphy is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute. He is the author of many books. His latest is Contra Krugman: Smashing the Errors of America’s Most Famous KeynesianHis other works include Chaos Theory, Lessons for the Young Economist, and Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action (Independent Institute, 2015) which is a modern distillation of the essentials of Mises’s thought for the layperson. Murphy is cohost, with Tom Woods, of the popular podcast Contra Krugman, which is a weekly refutation of Paul Krugman’s New York Times column. He is also host of The Bob Murphy Show.

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Will Democracy’s Myths Doom Liberty? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 24, 2020

Rather than revealing the “will of the people,” election results are often a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions.

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.

https://mises.org/wire/will-democracys-myths-doom-liberty?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=7fe6676c9a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_10_02_06_25_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-7fe6676c9a-228343965

James Bovard

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

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including 2012’s Public Policy Hooligan, and 2006’s Attention Deficit Democracy. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and many other publications.

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What will be the foreign policy of the next US President?, by Thierry Meyssan

Posted by M. C. on September 11, 2020

The two programs for the Trump and Biden candidacies are not similar to those of previous candidates. It is no longer a question of adjusting the United States to the changing world, but of defining what they will be. The question is existential, so it is quite possible that things will degenerate and end in violence. For some, the country must be a nation at the service of its citizens, for others it must restore its imperial status.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article210762.html

by Thierry Meyssan

The U.S. 2020 presidential campaign pits two radically different visions of the United States: empire or nation?

On the one hand, Washington’s claim to dominate the world by “containment” – a strategy articulated by George Kennan in 1946 and followed by all presidents until 2016 – and on the other hand, the rejection of imperialism and the desire to facilitate the fortunes of Americans in general – a strategy articulated by President Andrew Jackson (1829-37) and taken up only by President Donald Trump (2017-20).

Each of these two camps wields rhetoric that masks its true practice. Democrats and Republicans pose as heralds of the “free world” in the face of “dictatorships”, as defenders of racial, gender and sexual orientation discrimination, and as champions of the fight against “global warming”. The Jacksonians, for their part, take turns denouncing the corruption, perversity and ultimately hypocrisy of their predecessors while calling to fight for their nation and not for the empire.

The two camps have in common only the same cult of force; whether it is at the service of the empire (Democrats and Republicans) or the nation (Jacksonians).

The fact that the Jacksonians unexpectedly became a majority in the country and took control of the Republican Party adds to the confusion, but should not confuse trumpism with what the Republican ideology has been since World War II.

In reality, Democrats and Republicans tend to be well-to-do people or professionals in new technologies, while Jacksonians – like the “yellow vests” in France – are rather poor and professionally tied to the land from which they cannot escape.

For the 2020 campaign, Democrats and Republicans are united behind former Vice President Jo Biden. He and his supporters are extremely voluble about their intentions:
- “The Power of America’s Example”, by Joseph R. Biden Jr., Voltaire Network, 11 July 2019.
- “Why America Must Lead Again. Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump”, by Joseph R. Biden Jr., Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020.
And especially the statement by senior Republican national security officials to Democrat Biden :
- “A Statement by Former Republican National Security Officials”, Voltaire Network, 20 August 2020.
On the contrary, Donald Trump is evasive in writing:
- “Donald Trump Second Term Agenda”, by Donald Trump, Voltaire Network, 24 August 2020 (foreign policy is the small paragraph at the end of the text).

In my view, the main disputes are not stated, but are constantly implied.

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As a television host, Donald Trump dreamed of giving the country back to the people as President Andrew Jackson did.

The Jacksonian agenda

As soon as he took office, Donald Trump questioned the Rumsfeld/Cebrowsky strategy of annihilating the state structures of all the countries of the “Broader Middle East” without exception and announced his wish to bring home the troops lost in the “war without end”. This goal remains at the top of his priorities in 2020 (“Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops Home”).

As a result, he excluded the Director of the CIA and the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from regular meetings of the National Security Council. In so doing, he deprived the supporters of imperialism of their main tool of conquest.

See:
- “Presidential Memorandum: Organization of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council”, by Donald Trump, Voltaire Network, 28 January 2017. And “Donald Trump winds up “the” organization of US imperialism”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 31 January 2017.

There followed a battle for the presidency of this council with the indictment of General Michael T. Flynn, then his replacement by General H. R. McMaster, the exceptionalist John R. Bolton, and finally Robert C. O’Brien.

In May 2017, Donald Trump called on U.S. allies to immediately cease their support for jihadists charged with implementing the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy. This was the Riyadh speech to the Sunni heads of state and then to NATO heads of state and government. President Trump had declared NATO obsolete before changing his mind. However, he obtained not the abandonment of Russia’s policy of containment, but the halving of the credits used for this purpose and the allocation of the funds thus preserved to the fight against jihadism. In doing so, it partially stopped making NATO an instrument of imperialism and turned it into a defensive alliance. It has therefore demanded that its members contribute to its budget. Support for jihadism, however, was pursued by the supporters of imperialism with private means, notably the KKR Fund.

See:
- “Presidential Memorandum: Plan to Defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”, by Donald Trump, Voltaire Network, 28 January 2017.
- “Donald Trump’s Speech to the Arab Islamic American Summit”, by Donald Trump, Voltaire Network, 21 May 2017.
- “Remarks by Donald Trump at NATO Unveiling of the Article 5 and Berlin Wall Memorials”, by Donald Trump, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2017.

Hence his watchwords: “Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans” and “Get Allies to Pay their Fair Share.

Like the Democrats and Republicans, the Jacksonian Donald Trump is committed to restoring the capabilities of his armies (“Maintain and Expand America’s Unrivaled Military Strength”). Unlike his predecessors, he did not seek to transform the Pentagon’s delusional management by privatizing one department at a time, but rather developed a plan to recruit researchers to compete technologically once again with the Russian and Chinese armies.

See:
- “National Security Strategy of the United States of America”, December 2017. And “Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 26 December 2017.

Only Donald Trump’s desire to regain primacy in missile matters is supported by Democrats and Republicans, although they do not agree on how to achieve it (“Build a Great Cybersecurity Defense System and Missile Defense System”) : the tenant of the White House wants the USA to equip itself alone with these weapons that it can eventually deploy on the territory of its allies, while its opponents want to involve the allies in order to maintain their hold on them. From the point of view of the Democrats and Republicans, the problem is obviously not withdrawing from the Cold War disarmament treaties to build a new arsenal, but the loss of means of diplomatic pressure on Russia.

A professional politician, Joe Biden hopes to restore the imperial status of the former First World Power.

The program of Democrats and non-party Republicans

Joe Biden proposes to focus on three objectives: (1) reinvigorate democracy (2) train the middle class to cope with globalization (3) regain global leadership.

- Reinvigorate democracy: in his words, this means basing public action on the “informed consent” of Americans. In doing so, he used Walter Lipmann’s 1922 terminology, according to which democracy presupposes “manufacturing consent”. This theory was discussed at length by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988. It obviously has nothing to do with the definition formulated by President Abraham Lincoln: “Democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

Joe Biden believes he is achieving his goal by restoring the morality of public action through the practice of “political correctness”. For example, he condemns “the horrible practice [of President Trump] of separating families and placing the children of immigrants in private prisons,” without saying that President Trump was merely applying a democratic law to show its futility. Or he announces that he wants to reaffirm the condemnation of torture that President Trump justified, without saying that the latter, like President Obama, has already banned the practice while maintaining life imprisonment without trial in Guantánamo.

He announced his intention to convene a Summit for Democracy to fight against corruption, to defend the “Free World” against authoritarian regimes, and to advance human rights. In view of his definition of democracy, it is a question of uniting allied states by denouncing scapegoats for what is wrong (the “corrupt”) and promoting human rights in the Anglo-Saxon sense and especially not in the French sense. That is to say, to stop police violence and not to help citizens to participate in decision-making. This summit will launch an appeal to the private sector so that new technologies cannot be used by authoritarian states to monitor their citizens (but the USA and its NSA can always use them in the interest of the “Free World”).

Finally, Joe Biden concludes this chapter by highlighting his role in the Transatlantic Commission for Electoral Integrity alongside his friends, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who overthrew the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and Michael Chertoff, former US Secretary of Homeland Security, who put all US citizens under surveillance. Not forgetting John Negroponte who organized the Contras in Nicaragua and Daesh in Iraq.

- Educating the middle class to cope with globalization. Joe Biden believes that the politics that have been pursued since the dissolution of the USSR have led to the rapid disappearance of the middle class, and that training the remaining middle class in the use of new technologies will prevent the relocation of their jobs.

- Renewing U.S. leadership. In the name of democracy, this means stopping the rise of “populists, nationalists and demagogues. This formulation helps us understand that democracy, according to Joe Biden, is not only the fabrication of consent, but also the eradication of the popular will. If demagogues pervert democratic institutions, populists serve the popular will and nationalists serve the community.

Joe Biden then specifies that he will stop wars “forever”; a formulation that seems to support the same goal as the Jacksonians, but differs in terminology. It is in fact a question of validating the current adaptation of the system to the limits imposed by President Trump: why make US soldiers die abroad when one can pursue the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy with jihadists at a lower cost? All the more so since when he was only an opposition senator, Joe Biden gave his name to the plan to partition Iraq that the Pentagon was trying to impose.

A verse follows on the enlargement of NATO to include Latin American, African and Pacific allies. Far from being obsolete, the Alliance will once again become the heart of U.S. imperialism.

Finally, Joe Biden pleads for the renewal of the 5+1 agreement with Iran and disarmament treaties with Russia. The agreement with President Hassan Rohani aims to classically divide Muslim countries into Sunni and Shia, while the disarmament treaties aim to confirm that the Biden administration would not envisage a global confrontation, but the continued containment of its competitor.

The program of the Democratic Party candidate and non-party Republicans concludes with the assurance of joining the Paris Accord and taking leadership in the fight against global warming. Joe Biden specifies that he will not give gifts to China, which is relocating its most polluting industries along the Silk Road. On the other hand, he omits to say that his friend, Barack Obama, before entering politics, was the drafter of the statutes of the Chicago Carbon Emissions Trading Exchange. The fight against global warming is not so much an ecological issue as a matter for bankers.

Conclusion

It must be said that everything is opposed to a clarification. Four years of upheavals by President Trump have only succeeded in replacing the “endless wars” with a low-intensity private war. There are certainly far fewer deaths, but it is still war.

The elites who enjoy imperialism are not ready to give up their privileges.

So it is to be feared that the U.S. will be forced to go through an internal conflict, a civil war, and break up like the Soviet Union once did.

Translation
Roger Lagassé
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Nock and Mencken on Democracy and Equality | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on July 31, 2020

The government “is a separate, independent and often hostile power.” Mencken perceived “the deep sense of antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is…a separate and autonomous corporation mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefits of their own members…, oppressing the taxpayers to their own gain.” The best kind of government, he writes, “is one which lets the individual alone, one which barely escapes being no government at all.”

If one of the main purposes of civilized governments is to preserve and augment liberty of the individual, then surely democracy accomplishes it less efficiently than any other form of government, since “the aim of democracy is to break all free spirits.”

https://mises.org/wire/nock-and-mencken-democracy-and-equality

[Adapted from “The Libertarian Legacy of the Old Right: Democracy and Representative Government,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 23 (2019): 5–21.]

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) and Henry L. Mencken (1880–1956) were the two leading libertarian intellectuals of the Old Right, during the thirties of the twentieth century. Both defended laissez-faire but opposed the New Deal, any connections between big government and big business, the First World War and the American policy of imperialism. They were also very polemical against various movements for cultural and moral elevation of the people, such as Prohibition and the battle for public education.

With Myth of a Guilty Nation, published in 1922, Nock influenced an entire generation of classical liberals, opposing Wilsonian internationalism and arguing for anti-militarism. From 1920 to 1924 he was editor of the weekly journal The Freeman. His writings are mostly elitist, based as they are on the fundamental role of the individual capable of elevating himself over the mass of the people. His thought is anchored in a strong individualism, explicitly critical of any forms of statism. Nock has a disenchanted approach to democracy, mainly based on the idea that the lowering of the level of culture and education is related to the democratic ideology. Enlarging the suffrage would not do any better and its only result would be the destruction of the highest ranks of culture. The policy, decided on by the government, of universal education is based on the theory that everyone is equally educable and that education has to be extended to the largest possible group. But, for Nock, this does not make sense, since we are not all equals in attitudes and capacities. The only true kind of equality is the equality of liberty and before the law. But the education system is based on a perversion of the idea of equality and on democracy. First of all, Nock clarifies, the Founding Fathers chose the republican system as the best way to secure the free expression of the individual in politics. A republic where everybody votes is considered ipso facto a democracy, but considering republican and democratic as synonymous is simply a confusion of terms. Actually, strictly speaking, democracy is simply a matter of counting the ballots, but it became an ideology. “Republicanism”—Nock writes—“does not…of itself even imply democracy….Democracy is not a matter of an extension of the suffrage….It is a matter of the diffusion of ownership; a true doctrine of democracy is a doctrine of public property.” And this because we are “aware that it is not, never was and never will be, those who vote that rule, but those who own.” So democracy, being an economic status, is animated by a strong resentment toward the élite, the socially, economically and intellectually superior persons. The democratic ideology rejects the simple reality that some achievements and experiences are open only to some people and not to all. Democracy postulates that everybody has to enjoy the same things.

The whole institutional life organized under the popular idea of democracy, then, must reflect this resentment. It must aim at no ideals above those of the average man, that is to say, it must regulate itself by the lowest common denominator of intelligence, taste and character in the society which it represents.

In a democratic system, therefore, education would be “common property” and so what is not manageable by everybody must be disregarded. This leads to a low and poor level of education and to the destruction of the higher ranks of culture, art, taste and life itself. Moreover, Nock’s theory of the state, as an enemy institution, founded on exploitation and robbery, sheds further light on his ideas about democracy. The doctrine of popular sovereignty was a structural alteration to the state, necessary to make people believe that the state was literally the expression of the popular will. Democratic representation has been an expedient in order to submit the subjects to a state they believed was legitimate. The most important expedient

was that of bringing in the so called representative or parliamentary system, which Puritanism introduced into the modern world, and which has received a great deal of praise as an advance towards democracy. This praise, however, is exaggerated. The change was one of form only, and its bearing on democracy has been inconsiderable.

Henry Louis Mencken was a leading protagonist of the American Old Right. In the weekly journal American Mercury, he and his colleagues bitterly criticized moral crusaders and the entire Wilsonian politics that considered the United States as the guardian of the world. Although he was a literary figure and did not elaborate a systematic system of political thought, he can rightly be considered a libertarian. Both Murray N. Rothbard and [Justin] Raimondo are convinced that there are many good reasons to place Mencken in the libertarian tradition. Rothbard defined him as “the joyous libertarian” for his witty and satirical prose. Mencken was, in Rothbard’s words, “a serene and confident individualist, dedicated to competence and excellence and deeply devoted to liberty, but convinced that the bulk of his fellows were beyond repair.” Mencken had a great influence on the Old Right during the twenties, rejecting the idea of a world war for peace and democracy, and defending laissez-faire in economics and in private life. His liberating force and his writings were not for the masses, but for the intelligent few who could understand and appreciate his message. Mencken believed that

government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man; its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him….One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regards to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

The government “is a separate, independent and often hostile power.” Mencken perceived “the deep sense of antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is…a separate and autonomous corporation mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefits of their own members…, oppressing the taxpayers to their own gain.” The best kind of government, he writes, “is one which lets the individual alone, one which barely escapes being no government at all.”

Mencken’s individualist perspective gives great consistency to his views on many topics, among the most important of which is democracy. Notes on Democracy, published in 1926, contains one of the most scathing critiques of the idea that the great masses of the people have an inalienable right to govern themselves and that they are competent to do it. A government is considered a good one if it can satisfy quickly the desires and ideas of the masses, that is to say of the inferior men. A good and democratic government is based on the idea of the omnipotence and omniscience of the masses. But, Mencken states, “that there is actually no more evidence for the wisdom of the inferior man, nor for his virtue, than there is for the notion that Friday is an unlucky day.” Mencken begins his analysis of democracy examining the psychology of the democratic man and clarifying that “in an aristocratic society government is a function of those who have got relatively far up the poles….In a democratic society it is the function of all, and hence mainly of those who have got only a few spans from the ground.” The democratic man contemplates with bitterness and admiration those who are above him. Bitterness and admiration form a complex of prejudices that, in a democracy, is called public opinion, which, under democracy, is regarded as something sacred. But, asks Mencken:

What does the mob think? It thinks, obviously, what its individual members think. And what is that? It is, in brief, what somewhat sharp-nosed and unpleasant children think. The mob, being composed, in the overwhelming main, of men and women who have not got beyond the ideas and emotions of childhood, hovers, in mental age, around the time of puberty, and chiefly below it. If we would get at its thoughts and feelings we must look for light to the thoughts and feelings of adolescents.

The main sentiment of humanity is fear and the main sentiment of the democratic man is envy. The “democratic man hates the fellow who is having a better time in this world” (Mencken 1926, 45), this is why, according to Mencken, envy is the origin of democracy. Politicians are well aware of the psychology of the masses, and those who know how to use the fears of the mob are the most successful. “Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter”; in fact “the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something.” Actually politics are not determined by the will of the people, but by small groups with special interests able to use the fears and to excite the envy of the masses. “Public policies are determined and laws are made by small minorities playing upon the fears and imbecilities of the mob.” Those who succeed in the realm of politics are not the best and most intelligent men, but are the ablest and cunning demagogues. Anticipating Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Mencken states that except for a miracle it would be very difficult for a man of value to be elected to office in a democratic state. The problem is that people believe that “the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy” or something closer to direct democracy. The great masses of men, though free in theory, submit to oppression and exploitation. In fact, according to Mencken, the popular will remains purely theoretical in every form of democracy. Moreover, there is no reason for believing that its realization would change the main outlines of the democratic process, considering the low level of intelligence and knowledge of the mob.

Mencken examines the relationship between democracy and liberty and notes that the democratic man does not fight to gain more liberty but for more security and protection. “The fact,” he writes, is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind….Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without.” But these are not the characteristics of the democratic masses. Actually, the masses’ longing for material goods can only be satisfied at the expense of liberty and property rights. It cannot be denied that freedom is an indispensable condition for the development of the personality of the individual, but if we look at the propensities of the masses we discover that frequently they prefer to sacrifice freedom in order to enjoy material or psychological advantages. The average man wants to feel protected even from himself. Writes Mencken:

The truth is that the common’s man love of liberty…is almost wholly imaginary….He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed….He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the herdsman with it. Liberty is not a thing for such as he….The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe….What the common man longs for…is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace—the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty.

The average man tends to consider liberty as a weapon used against him in the hands of superior men but, recalling Edmund Burke, Mencken writes that

the heritage of freedom belongs to a small minority of men….It is my contention that such a heritage is necessary in order that the concept of liberty…may be so much as grasped—that such ideas cannot be implanted in the mind of man at will, but must be bred in as all other ideas are bred in….It takes quite as long to breed a libertarian as it takes to breed a racehorse.

If one of the main purposes of civilized governments is to preserve and augment liberty of the individual, then surely democracy accomplishes it less efficiently than any other form of government, since “the aim of democracy is to break all free spirits.” Mencken describes the tyrannical consequences of the cultural levelling tendencies of democracy. Like Alexis de Tocqueville he realizes that the pressure of a mass society of men all alike and equal leads to ostracism of those superior individuals “merely thinking unpopular thoughts.” “Once” a man “is accused of such heresy, the subsequent proceedings take on the character of a lynching.” The democratic, egalitarian society is pledged to common cultural values resulting in a rigorous homogeneity of way of thinking and of life. So “a man who stands in contempt of the prevailing ideology has no rights under the law.” By the mid-thirties the influence of Nock and Mencken had begun to decline. The Old Right, after playing an important role opposing the New Deal and in the crucible of the First World War, almost disappeared. During the years of World War II, government banned any opposition to war, Roosevelt and the New Deal. “The Old Right went underground for the duration” of the war and when America emerged from the war a new generation of old style libertarians appeared. They believed in laissez-faire and nonintervention in foreign policy.

 

Author:

Contact Roberta A. Modugno

Roberta Modugno is professor history of political thought at the University of Roma TRE (Rome – Italy). A scholar of American libertarianism, she is the author of several works on Murray N. Rothbard and edited the collection of Rothbard’s papers, Rothbard versus the Philosophers: Unpublished Writings on Hayek, Mises,

 

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Mises on Secession | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on July 8, 2020

https://mises.org/library/mises-secession?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=9afce7e2be-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-9afce7e2be-228343965

[Editor’s Note: Contrary to some attempts to portray Ludwig von Mises as a theorist who rejected radical solutions, we find in his works that Mises supported radical decentralization and widespread secession. Hans-Hermann Hoppe discusses Mises’s views below.]

“A nation, therefore, has no right to say to a province: You belong to me, I want to take you. A province consists of its inhabitants. If anybody has a right to be heard in this case it is these inhabitants. Boundary disputes should be settled by plebiscite.” (Omnipotent Government, p. 90)

“No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.” (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 34)

“Liberalism knows no conquests, no annexations; just as it is indifferent towards the state itself, so the problem of the size of the state is unimportant to it. It forces no one against his will into the structure of the state. Whoever wants to emigrate is not held back. When a part of the people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only do so. The nation as an organic entity can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states; the world as a whole can neither win nor lose from them.” (Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 39–40)

“The size of a state’s territory therefore does not matter.” (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 82)

“The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.” (Liberalism, p. 109)

“If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done.” (Liberalism, pp. 109–10)

The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.” (Liberalism, p. 119)

“It makes no difference where the frontiers of a country are drawn. Nobody has a special material interest in enlarging the territory of the state in which he lives; nobody suffers loss if a part of this area is separated from the state. It is also immaterial whether all parts of the state’s territory are in direct geographical connection, or whether they are separated by a piece of land belonging to another state. It is of no economic importance whether the country has a frontage on the ocean or not. In such a world the people of every village or district could decide by plebiscite to which state they wanted to belong.” (Omnipotent Government, p. 92)

From an interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe in the Austrian Economics Newsletter (AEN):

AEN: Was Mises better than the classical liberals on the question of the state?

HOPPE: Mises thought it was necessary to have an institution that suppresses those people who cannot behave appropriately in society, people who are a danger because they steal and murder. He calls this institution government.

But he has a unique idea of how government should work. To check its power, every group and every individual, if possible, must have the right to secede from the territory of the state. He called this the right of self-determination, not of nations as the League of Nations said, but of villages, districts, and groups of any size. In Liberalism and Nation, State, and Economy, he elevates secession to a central principle of classical liberalism. If it were possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, he says, it would have to be done. Thus the democratic state becomes, for Mises, a voluntary organization.

AEN: Yet you have been a strong critic of democracy.

HOPPE: Yes, as that term is usually understood. But under Mises’s unique definition of democracy, the term means self-rule or self-government in its most literal sense. All organizations in society, including government, should be the result of voluntary interactions.

In a sense you can say that Mises was a near anarchist. If he stopped short of affirming the right of individual secession, it was only because of what he regarded as technical grounds. In modern democracy, we exalt the method of majority rule as the means of electing the rulers of a compulsory monopoly of taxation.

Mises frequently made an analogy between voting and the marketplace. But he was quite aware that voting in the marketplace means voting with your own property. The weight of your vote is in accord with your value productivity. In the political arena, you do not vote with your property; you vote concerning the property of everyone, including your own. People do not have votes according to their value productivity.

AEN: Yet Mises attacks anarchism in no uncertain terms.

HOPPE: His targets here are left-utopians. He attacks their theory that man is good enough not to need an organized defense against the enemies of civilization. But this is not what the private-property anarchist believes. Of course murderers and thieves exist. There needs to be an institution that keeps these people at bay. Mises calls this institution government, while people who want no state at all point out that all essential defensive services can be better performed by firms in the market. We can call these firms government if we want to.

Authors:

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called praxeology.

Contact Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher. He is the founder and president of The Property and Freedom Society.

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It’s the 4th of July! Why Is Democracy Destroying the World? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 4, 2020

In natural democracy, folks seek out others who agree with them and are willing, temporarily at least, to contribute time and/or money to their mutually agreed upon project(s). They don’t involve those who aren’t interested in their project(s) and certainly don’t expect the non-interested to pay for them.

In fact, as six-term U.S. Senator John McCain explains, it’s often those professional lobbyists who write the laws passed by the minions and, according to 26-term (52 year) U.S. Congressman John Conyers, the minions don’t even read them anyway – – –

“We don’t read most of the bills…that we pass.”

Do you suppose they’re passing too many? Rep. Conyers seems to think so. You will too if you keep reading.

Https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/l-reichard-white/its-the-4th-of-july-why-is-democracy-destroying-the-world/

By

History definitively proves that, when practiced by governments, democracy guarantees discord, discontent, disharmony, upheaval, chaos, and political disaster, often leading to totalitarianism.

But,” you may be thinking already, “How can that be? Isn’t democracy good? Doesn’t it prevent those things?

So you may be surprised to discover that more than half — 58% — of 4 million folks around the world surveyed in a Cambridge U. study are dissatisfied with democracy. That’s the highest level of discontent ever recorded in the survey’s 25 year history. Further, the level of dissatisfaction is particularly high in the U.S.A. and U.K.

The New Yorker calls the unprecedented number of world-wide upheavals, most in democracies, The Story of 2019.” They’re continuing in 2020.

For starters, there are upheavals in The Cradle of Democracy, Greece — and Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, Algeria, Haiti, Hong Kong, Columbia, Sudan, Brazil, Argentina. And more democracies on the brink. South Africa, Italy, and “authorities” aren’t too sure about India, etc.

Even Germany. And England, Scotland, Ireland, Whales and their people are divided over “BREXIT.”

These shakey democracies include assumed-to-be extremely stable countries such as Chile, Spain (Catalonia), Venezuela, Lebanon, even Israel.

Perhaps most surprising so far is France, with over a year — 60 weeks so far — of massive street demonstrations, beginning on Nov. 17, 2018 with the “Gilets Jaunes” or “Yellow Vests,” ignited by an increase in petrol tax and now re-upped by the Orange Vests, ignited by an attempted government re-form of French “Social Security.”

You can find a sporadically updated list with links here: UNCOMMON SENSE: Major Demonstrations and Riots .

In some ways, these uprisings are more focused continuations of the “Occupy” Movements that began in late 2011 and spread all around the world to at least 951 cities in 82 countries.

The”Occupy Wall Street” branch prompted U.S. President Barack Obama to quip to the bankers rather appropriately, My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.

And there’s this:

31% Think U.S. Civil War Likely Soon – Rasmussen Reports®

And that was all before the COVID-19 fiasco and the George Floyd related Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations all around the world.

Maybe democracy isn’t such a good idea after all? And do the bankers have something to do with it? If so, what?

Let’s take a look – – –

Imagine “we” — that is all approximately 320 million Americans — went to Baskin & Robbins (or Ben and Jerry’s) but collectively we — even the folks who didn’t vote — or even eat — all had to buy and pay for the winning flavor of ice cream — vanilla perhaps. Even when less than half voted for it. Even when less than half voted at all. –L. Reichard White, What You Mean ‘We,’ Paleface?

That’s an example of direct democracy. On the other hand, we might elect a few folks to decide which flavor of ice cream we all get and how much we have to pay for it. That would be “representative democracy.”

Clearly such circumstances should be avoided if at all possible, especially because when the “majority rules,” there’s always a minority that loses. The more votes taken, the more losers.

There’s a third form of democracy which avoids that problem. It’s the one we want, use in our daily lives, and subconsciously ass-u-me when we hear the word. That’s probably because it’s almost certainly built-in to our genome. We’ll call that natural democracy.

In natural democracy, folks seek out others who agree with them and are willing, temporarily at least, to contribute time and/or money to their mutually agreed upon project(s). They don’t involve those who aren’t interested in their project(s) and certainly don’t expect the non-interested to pay for them.

Where natural democracy exists — as practiced by the original North American inhabitants and other “primitive” folks and in most of our day-to-day interactions, including voluntary exchanges in markets free of unwanted third party taxers and pseudo “regulators” — the folks who want vanilla get and pay for their own vanilla. Even the folks who want Bacon or Razzleberry can usually get what they want.

And the folks who aren’t hungry or don’t want ice cream don’t have to pay or even get off the recliner to vote.

On the other hand, some of them might voluntarily contribute to folks they feel need ice cream.

Who would want to do things any other way?

Because it’s so difficult, expensive, time-consuming and thus impractical to take universal votes on everything, direct democracy becomes unwieldly, even in relatively small groups.

As a result, despite certain psychological advantages, there are few groups of any size — and no countries — run by direct democracy.

When practiced in private groups, however — where participation is voluntary — both direct democracy and representative democracy approximate natural democracy and so can be useful.

And because you aren’t forced to belong to such private, voluntary groups — the PTA, Orthodox church, Mosque, the local paint-ball club, etc. — and those who do belong are free to easily leave them and/or stop paying dues, they stay mostly under control or else they disappear.

However, once you lose that ability to easily leave a group — and/or to stop paying dues — the membership loses that easy control and the organization eventually gets out of control.

Democracy or not, that “gets out of control” situation always applies to territorial state-based governments. That’s because, if you live in the geographical area they claim, those organizations make your membership mandatory, claim jurisdiction over you, and assert the right to extort your dues as “taxes.” This insight may be what promped U.S. founder Thomas Jefferson to pen, “The tree of liberty must be watered periodically with the blood of tyrants and patriots alike.

And so, lacking meaningful control, sooner or later territorial states begin to deteriorate towards discord, discontent, disharmony, upheaval, chaos, and political disaster, often leading to totalitarianism.

History — particularly 2019 and 2020 history as above and developing — shows this just happens a lot faster in democracies. Why do you suppose?

And yes, these days the banks — especially the Central Banks — are involved.

And yes, there’s an alternative form of government that can, temporarily at least, hold the bad territorial democracies at bey.

Our early American ancestors understood the dangers of democracy — and of majority rule in general — and weren’t shy in warning about them – – –

Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.” –U.S. “Founding Father” John Adams

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for” –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIII, 1782. ME 2:163

U.S. “founding father” James Madison was more specific – – –

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” –James Madison, Federalist Paper 10:

That’s what happens when folks stop minding their own business and start minding someone else’s. Read the rest of this entry »

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Brexiteers Don’t Want Democracy; They Want Freedom | The American Spectator

Posted by M. C. on January 31, 2020

American satirist H. L. Mencken was devastating in his critique of the common voter. “He not only doesn’t long for liberty, he is quite unable to stand it,” he wrote scornfully. “All else is affectation, delusion, empty words.” But Mencken never met a Brexiteer, for whom liberty is the sine qua non of his existence.

https://spectator.org/brexiteers-dont-want-democracy-they-want-freedom/

And by George, they’ve got it: The UK leaves the EU this weekend.
When the United Kingdom exits the European Union late on Friday, Brexit will be hailed as a victory for British democracy. Three times Britons voted to leave the EU and “take back control”: in June 2016, when the Leave campaign won at the EU referendum; in the general election the following June, when the vast majority of voters cast ballots for parties promising to fulfill the referendum will of the people (even though the Conservative party itself only achieved a minority government); and finally in December 2019 — the second general election in as many years — after months and months of Remainer parliamentary obstruction, Britons overwhelming elected Boris Johnson on the pledge to “get Brexit done.” Third time’s the charm.

But is this really a victory for democracy? Yes, on the face of it, if by democracy you mean one person, one vote. On the other hand, Britons were subjected, figuratively and literally, to months of their elected representatives in the House of Commons hell-bent on frustrating that self-same will, all in the name of parliamentary democracy.

The prime minister and no less than Elizabeth II, fulfilling their legitimate constitutional powers to prorogue Parliament, were vetoed by an unaccountable UK Supreme Court, “miraculously” imbued with the ability to augur that the Head of State and her First Minister were motivated by malevolent intent against democracy. Thus vetoed, Boris Johnson was forced to return to the Commons, cap in hand, to the repellent glee of Remainers. Brexiteers were rightfully outraged, while the establishment was unconvincingly nonplussed. They hear “the fury in your words, but not your words,” to summon up Shakespeare.

What is it about democracy that Brexiteers dislike? Most would never put the question so bluntly and, if queried, would proclaim themselves the most proud and patriotic democrats in all of England. Except … Why do politicians and more perniciously, “public” servants, put their interests above those whom they have sworn to serve?

Were justification required, we could put the blame on Edmund Burke, who infamously told his Bristol electors that MPs “owe you, not his industry only, but his judgment.” Furthermore, “he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion,” Burke protested.

Burke’s political nostrum, however, had its limits even in his own day, let alone in ours. In truth, we need go no further than to admit that public officials are usually no more “public-spirited” than the general run of the populace. Perhaps even less so.

Brexiteers who are fully committed to British independence don’t stop at limiting the power of Brussels. They’ll extend it to Westminster, too. Here they enjoy the support of the late Victorian political economist and (classical) Liberal MP, W. E. H. Lecky. “This increase of State power means a multiplication of restrictions,” Lecky wrote. “It means an increase of bureaucracy”— them again! — and a “constant increase of taxation, which is in reality a constant restriction of liberty.”

Lecky was an early opponent of the evils attending democracy and taxing powers, joining John C. Calhoun before him and Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek (as well as many others) after him. “No danger in representative government was deemed greater than that it should degenerate into a system of veiled confiscation,” Lecky observed, “one class voting the taxes which another class was compelled to pay.”

So while not disavowing democracy outright, few Brexiteers are happy with its results. Like most public disaffection, democratic dissatisfaction has been roiling under the surface of public discourse for decades. UK governments shifted from Conservative to Labour and back again, sometimes even comprising a coalition when circumstances warranted, but nothing seemed to change for the better. If anything, the state of British politics only worsened. Until Brexit came along.

American satirist H. L. Mencken was devastating in his critique of the common voter. “He not only doesn’t long for liberty, he is quite unable to stand it,” he wrote scornfully. “All else is affectation, delusion, empty words.” But Mencken never met a Brexiteer, for whom liberty is the sine qua non of his existence.

We may no longer need question why the Brexiteer has an uneasy relationship with democracy, seeing as how the burgeoning State robs him not only of his liberty but of his tax dollars, too. More to the point, however, is just how far Brexiteers are willing to go to regain both their freedom and their hard-won earnings. Is their outrage confined to Brussels, or are they willing to take on Westminster, too?

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Democracy and Tyranny – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2020

It’s Congress that poses the greatest threat to our liberties. The framers’ distrust is seen in the negative language of our Bill of Rights such as: Congress “shall not abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, and shall not be violated, nor be denied.” When we die and if at our next destination we see anything like a Bill of Rights, we know that we’re in hell because a Bill of Rights in heaven would suggest that God couldn’t be trusted.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/walter-e-williams/democracy-and-tyranny/

 

During President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial, we’ll hear a lot of talk about our rules for governing. One frequent claim is that our nation is a democracy. If we’ve become a democracy, it would represent a deep betrayal of our founders, who saw democracy as another form of tyranny. In fact, the word democracy appears nowhere in our nation’s two most fundamental documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The founders laid the ground rules for a republic as written in the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, which guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”

John Adams captured the essence of the difference between a democracy and republic when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.” Contrast the framers’ vision of a republic with that of a democracy. In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent power. The restraint is upon the individual instead of the government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government.

Here are a few quotations that demonstrate the contempt that our founders held for a democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, wrote that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.”

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph said that “in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” Alexander Hamilton agreed, saying: “We are now forming a republican government. (Liberty) is found not in “the extremes of democracy but in moderate governments. … If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”

John Adams reminded us: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

John Marshall, the highly respected fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”

Thomas Paine said, “A Democracy is the vilest form of Government there is.”

The framers gave us a Constitution replete with undemocratic mechanisms. One constitutional provision that has come in for recent criticism is the Electoral College. In their wisdom, the framers gave us the Electoral College as a means of deciding presidential elections. That means heavily populated states can’t run roughshod over small, less-populated states.

Were we to choose the president and vice president under a popular vote, the outcome of presidential races would always be decided by a few highly populated states, namely California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, which contain 134.3 million people, or 41% of our population. Presidential candidates could safely ignore the interests of the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Delaware. Why? They have only 5.58 million Americans, or 1.7% of the U.S. population. We would no longer be a government “of the people.” Instead, our government would be put in power by and accountable to the leaders and citizens of a few highly populated states. It would be the kind of tyranny the framers feared.

It’s Congress that poses the greatest threat to our liberties. The framers’ distrust is seen in the negative language of our Bill of Rights such as: Congress “shall not abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, and shall not be violated, nor be denied.” When we die and if at our next destination we see anything like a Bill of Rights, we know that we’re in hell because a Bill of Rights in heaven would suggest that God couldn’t be trusted.

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