Posted on 05/09/2005 6:19:48 AM PDT by kjvail
The second anniversary of America's expedition into Iraq passed with relatively scant fanfare. Since hostilities in Mesopotamia commenced, thousands of American and Iraqi casualties have been tallied. Every month Washington spends billion of dollars on counterinsurgency and rebuilding efforts in Iraq and further afield, which swells the nation's largest budget and budget deficit in its history[i].
As vast quantities of blood and treasure are expended abroad, Washington politicians win plaudits domestically for their warmongering, and government contracting at home and abroad burgeon, on what basis is this imperial project—financed by foreign lenders and American taxpayers—justified?...
...Democracy deconstructed
As Hans Hermann-Hoppe adeptly describes in Democracy: The God that failed, the democratic state is inherently a "public" monopoly. Unlike privately-owned monopolies, e.g., monarchies where the sovereign generally has an incentive to moderate expropriations of property to preserve the realm's present value for heirs, state officials in a democracy are mere caretakers who cannot privately enrich themselves from ownership or sale of government property.
Rather, a moral hazard and tragedy of the commons ensues as bureaucrats and politicians may merely exercise use of government property while on the state payroll, precipitating a strong inducement to maximize current use of government property, irrespective if such activities entail dire consequences for taxpayers and the economy at large.
As concerns government finance, officials conduct the borrowing and enjoy the resultant political plaudits from the constituencies that benefit from state largesse while other private citizens defray the expenditures and debts via taxation or government-stoked money creation. Indeed, Hoppe contends an elected president can run up public debts, instigate inflation, inaugurate long-running wars, and introduce other state projects footed by hapless taxpayers without being held personally liable for the consequences.
Rothbard’s Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy methodically chronicles how the personnel of successive democratically-elected administrations manipulated American foreign policy to secure the narrow self-interests of connected business interests whilst justifying these massive, costly and incessant interventions on the pretext of combating communism or promoting democracy.
Politicians who have aggressively expanded the state in America and elsewhere are extolled as great. Verily, democratic governance provides an alluring career for aspiring politicians, their cronies and bureaucrats. Not only do officials have the resources accrued by the state at their disposal, they also exercise the authority and wherewithal to confiscate private property and participate in the process of spending and borrowing—absent individual culpability—all the while receiving a salary and pension funded by taxpayers. Furthermore, politicians and appointed administrators are only accountable during regular popularity contests, in which voters can reshuffle personnel but are not inclined to alter fundamentally the scheme of free-for-all theft.
Hoppe states democracy abolishes the distinction between rulers and ruled—the limited opportunity to become a member of the royal family that pervaded under monarchy—and assumes that any member of the political system may ascend to the upper echelons of governance. Given the state's indispensable need to steal for its subsistence and the nearly unfettered entry into the ranks of the ruling class, democracy renders it that much easier for politicians to accelerate exactions from the public, as the gates remain open for any individual or faction to gain access to governmental powers and impose the same taxes or regulations themselves. As democracy has taken root in the United States and elsewhere, jostling between rival political factions has been less about how flaccid or robust the state should be, but what direction the state should take as its scope expands.
The ability of elected politicians and entrenched bureaucrats to institutionalize and enforce systematic predation and redistribution of private property is an outcome of the democratic ethos itself. Indeed, the grand bargain of democracy is this: every individual within the system—whether voluntarily or not—cedes the inviolable title to his or her property for the ability to either elect, participate in or marshal a political movement that competes for the privilege of seizing and spending everyone else's money. It follows that individual responsibility and private property ownership are seriously impaired and denigrated as the government-instituted "law of the jungle" taps innate human characteristics such as envy, self-preservation, and keenness for gratification.
As Frederic Bastiat explained in The Law, self-preservation and self-development are universal instincts among men as is the preference to do so with the minimum amount of pain and the maximum level of ease. Plunder then is favored over production, so long as the risks and inputs of confiscation are not as agonizing or as indomitable as the painstaking act of production and exchange. When given an opportunity to seize private property or stipulate regulations on owner's use thereof, as democratic rule is wont to do, participants in the political system vie for the chance to apply the state's coercive arm in service of their supporters' ends.
Motivated by envy and self-preservation, all classes of individuals demand, whether through forceful or pacific means, the franchise as its price for defraying the expenses of others running the government. Once empowered to help decide the course of public expenditures—Bastiat wrote—plundered classes opt to be as licentious as other enfranchised classes, rendering the systematic looting universal, even though such profligacy is undeniably detrimental to the economy's well-being.
It should be noted that the chief feedback mechanism of democratic government, voting, does occur in private enterprises and associations. Beyond this superficial similarity, however, there are acute distinctions. Shareholders exercise voting rights in a corporation proportionate to stock ownership whereas every eligible voter in a democratic election is entitled to one vote, irrespective if they are net tax-eaters or taxpayers.
Should shareholders grow disaffected by voting procedures, business strategies or dividends payouts they may opt out of owning a portion of an enterprise by selling stock, a prerogative denied to democratic voters who must acquiesce to government spending plans and policies—regardless of consent—lest they risk jail or emigration. The intrinsic tenuousness of property ownership in a democratic system and the inability to extricate oneself and possessions from possible confiscation accelerates the temptation to seize other people’s goods.
Bastiat argues that the onset of universal plunder undermines the purpose of law, in his view the collective organization of the individual right to defense of life, liberty and property. The moment law is perverted to engineer ends contrary to individual liberty, e.g., enshrining the notion individuals are entitled to a portion of each other’s property absent voluntary agreement, the conversion pits morality versus the adulterated law. Thus, moral chaos is the outcome of democratization, as one must either relinquish respect for the law or compromise moral sense.
The divergence between morality and democratic rule can be observed in legal positivism, the notion that right and wrong are absent prior to the introduction of legislation. Legislation attenuates predictability of law as the free entry into government and the intrinsic fluidity of political priorities ensure the governing process reflects the most urgent desires of policy-makers and the electorate, irrespective of the long-term ramifications of the enacted rules. Furthermore, the emergence of public or administrative law, which exempts government agents from individual culpability when exercising their sanctioned duties, enables the state's workforce to engage in behaviors that no other individual may commit licitly. Lew Rockwell cites a few euphemisms where the state excused itself from the laws it professes to uphold, such as kidnapping posing as selective service, counterfeiting masquerading as monetary policy and mass murder sold as foreign policy[v].
Consequently, law is not considered negative—inimical to injustice as Bastiat would have it—much less universal, eternally bestowed, discoverable by man and anterior to the institution of government. Bastiat asserts that the prior existence of life, liberty, and property is the impetus for enacting laws in the first place. Moreover, the demarcation between right and wrong and the very definition of crime is obfuscated and debased by the inexhaustible and transitory adoption and amendment of legislative diktat and the bifurcation of law codes applicable to the rulers and the ruled.
In sum, the unique characteristics of democratic government tend, according to Hoppe, Bastiat and others, to accelerate rising time preference, decivilization, and the incidence of crime to the detriment of private property, voluntary production and exchange, individual responsibility and even morality.
Why then do Messrs. Bush, Wolfowitz, and any other politicians, statesmen or bureaucrats get away with inaugurating recurring conflicts and administer an ever-expanding vehicle of coercion and plunder? The fundamental rules and ethos of democratic government impel man's innate inclination toward self-preservation and self-development to not only produce, trade and safeguard his own possessions but also employ legal theft to acquire more property from others.
Politicians and their deputies are merely the best at exploiting the system's impaired moral climate to organize the state's confiscatory arm to serve their backer's interests.
Yes you are quite correct that the monarchical system was much better for holding the masses of people in a state of virtual slavery and keeping any form of progress or enlightened thought from reaching the people.
Thank you Marx.
WAS a waste?
You must be counting the period prior to GWB's memorable victory celebration on the aircraft carrier.
Fact, up to THAT time our casualties were 149 young servicepersons. Since that time we have sacrificed TEN TIMES that many, scores and scores of wounded, and billions of borrowed dollars.
To what end? Well, exactly as I predicted in 2002 and early '03, we have carved out our very own Israeli type hell hole in the mideast.
We have had a lot of benefits from it, not the least of which is eliminating a sworn enemy who had a penchant for nursing grudges, no compunction about using terror, and total control of a semi-major state to back it up.
That sworn enemy was no threat to us .... nada, zilch, goose egg. He was not even a serious threat to Israel!
Ding, ding ding .... we have a winner for the two most deluded propositions in a single statement. We have total control(??). Have you heard there is a private enterprise (hooray?) that offers transportation from Baghdad to the airport for a mere $35,000/trip?
A semi-major state?!! I take it you are referring to the "sick man" of the middle east. A destitute nation without infrastructure?
Denial is not a river .... blah, blah, blah.
Comparison of feudal lords to gangsters, although derogatory, is legitimate. Indeed they were foremostly private individuals making private deals, enforcing private interests and waging private wars with private armies. The concept of modern state that somehow makes conscription and slaughter of men, or carpet bombing of civilian areas morally permissible, was foreign to them.
It is important not to idealize the past. Chroniclers record, for example, destruction of crops during war, and killing of the city's population following a successful siege.
The rest of your post is an illusion. A pervasive state that cannot be resisted by the individual simply did not exist till the 20 century. Peasant revolts were violence initiated by the peasants; you can sympathize with them rather than with their victims, but you cannot deny the right of retaliation, or the duty of the monarch to crush the revolt and restore peace. The teaching of the Church hasn't changed for 2000 years. It values peace and obedience to just authority, and blesses an occasional war when causes for war exist. A breach of confessional privacy is among the gravest offences a priest can commit. For most of the history of the Middle Ages and monarchical period, the Church stood in opposition to civil authority, -- as we endlessly discussed on another thread just recently.
My view differs form KJVail's in that I think that the golden age of civilization ended with the Reformation. Following Luther's apostasy we see ugly incidence of state churches, state-on-state violence, decadent monarchs, and overall decline, so that by the 19 century republics had justifiable appeal, and by the 20 century the innate advantages of monarchic social order were completely erased.
This is pretty simple, mate. Either we fight the jihadis over there, or we fight them over here. I'd rather we fight them over there, and so would everyone else whose head isn't buried in the sand.
Historical continuity is indeed a tricky thing. But if you see several Holy Roman Empires of German Nation, then you should also see at least three American republics, in the space of 216 years:
- Pre-Lincoln confederacy in the East
- Expansion into Indian and Mexican territories and robust capitalism
- Wilsonian imperialism and Rooseveltian domestic socialism.
Some people then look at this development and argue that monarchy is an inherently moderate and pacific form of government. If you look back at history, you see that that wasn't always the case. It's only because monarchs are so insecure on their thrones -- only because divine right isn't an accepted theory any more -- that monarchs are no danger.
An attempt is made to ground this idea in economics. It's argued that as "owners" of the country kings are more likely to be responsible in increasing wealth, as opposed to republican politicians who will squander the wealth that they only have access to for a few years. But again, when hereditary rulers have been secure in their "ownership" of their countries they could be quite spendthrift and wasteful.
It's not some overriding economic calculation that restrains monarchs. It's the countervailing power of popular assemblies and the fear of revolution. And it's by no means true that all monarchs were restrained by such checks.
One could make an argument that in republics citizens are led to think that the people are waging war or taxing themselves, and thus the electorate goes bears greater war losses and endures higher taxes in the belief that it's imposed such burdens on itself. That's a legitimate argument. But there are problems with it.
Kings and emperors get countries into ruinous wars and irritating fiscal crises. Eventually they are overthrown. In the next generation the limits of what the people will allow are higher, so are taxes and war casualties. But I doubt you can abstract monarchy out of history and make it the solution, when it's part of the process.
Hitler and Stalin were more destructive than any Hohenzollern, Hapsburg or Romanov, but it was such dynastic houses that gave us the First World War (and the support of the Italian royal family and German princelings for Mussolini and Hitler shouldn't be forgotten). In 1918 few would argue that a system that others believed had led to 20 million deaths should be retained lest 50 million die in the next generation. Presenting a theory that monarchy is better doesn't do much if you're living at a time when monarchs have done so much harm.
Republics like Greece and Italy are less stable than monarchies like Holland or Sweden. But it's not monarchy that makes them stable. It's that those populations are more generally phlegmatic and unexcitable (and those monarchies have long since been chastised and tamed -- they aren't the old Vasas waging trying to conquer Russia or alien Hapsburgs committing atrocities in the Low Countries. When Greece and Italy had monarchies they weren't any more stable or under control. Monarchy may have done something for Spain in recent years, but in previous centuries our judgement of the Spanish monarchy would have been far less positive.
I'm not anti-monarchy. It has worked in some situations and it won't do to prejudge the case. I'm against the pseudo-scientific theory that somehow monarchy is inherently better than republican government. It's based on too narrow and too selectively chosen a sample of history. It's junk social science.
This is exactly backwards, it was the destruction of the Austria-Hungarian and German monarchies that gave us WWII. Mussolini and the Savoy family in Italy had a very uneasy alliance for a time but you have to remember it was the monarchists that deposed and executed him.
Hitler was a rabid anti-monarchist, he blamed them for the defeat of Germany in WWI. There was never any kind of alliance between the NAZI party and the German monarchy, which was abolished long before his rise to power. It was the weakness of the unfettered democracy in the Weimar Republic that allowed Hitler to democratically come to power in Germany. His appeals were always to "the will of the people" and other such democratist rhetoric.
Just as Plato predicted and had been show 150 years earlier in France - democracy leads to tyranny.
You state, without much substantiation, that monarchs "could be quite spendthrift and wasteful", and that they "get countries into ruinous wars and irritating fiscal crises". From there you leap to the conclusion that monarchy is not inherently better.
This is not logical. For a social order to be inherently better one needs to examine the principles underlying the order. Piling on examples of bad monarchs -- particularly when examples of bad republics are close on hand -- does nothing to advance a theoretical argument.
The monarchist argument is that a king has no need to expand his power beyond the point when his kingdom is secure. He therefore naturally tends to govern as libertarians teach, minimally, and with protection of rights as primary concern. A politician is not secure by definition; his power depends on his success in selling government services to constituents, while in competition with other service sellers. This system would naturally tend to expand the government both vertically toward socialism and horizontally toward imperial militarism. Please explain why this is not so in principle.
Because monarchy is libertarian. See my previous post to X.
This is because without further refinement and development of established libertarian theory, it automatically evolves into a feudalistic monarchy if put into practice without outside interference. Of course this would never happen, but a theory must be able to maintain a consistent view on which compromises are then made. With out it, compromises are directionless and random, resulting in unintended consequences.
No. Your republic got all my money. It also heavily regulates swamplands, bridges, and towers even for those who can afford them.
Would not a libertarian king be a contradiction in terms, according sovereignty and elevated status based on heredity rather than contract? And why couldn't a libertarian king sell his crown or country to the highest bidder? Wouldn't any prohibition on doing so be an offense against freedom of the market? These questions are purely rhetorical for we will never see the fantasy of a libertarian king made real.
There are libertarians in the movement directly and indirectly dealing with this problem, but most libertarians just want to hide their heads in the sand and pretend that their is no problem at all. I am a libertarian, and am anti-monarchist.
Clearly, when libertarians gain power, they will have to set up a politburo tasked to prevent any such ideological slippage.
Put a banality number on those responses and save yourself typing effort.
From Reason magazine, here is a mainstream libertarian celebration of Bush's speech apologizing for Yalta -- with a hearty approval for Bush's support for freedom and democracy in the tough neighborhood that is within Russia's reach.
http://www.reason.com/links/links051005.shtml
I like some of Hoppe's critique of democracy but you can't go too far with his ideas. Being an non-believer he doesn't grasp the supernatural character of the institution (there was more than one attempt in history to have coronation declared a sacrament it is sacramental as it is), that's why I prefer EVK-L, he most assuredly does grasp it. Hoppe's (and Austrians in general) whole stateless society thing is contrary to human nature, the state is necessary, however we may certainly quibble about what form is best for the state. As St. Augustine writes monarchy is the best form of government because it most closely mirrors the Kingdom of God (City of God).
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