Beyond Democracy

“DEMOCRACY is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49 percent.”
— Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States

Government is not a benevolent Santa Claus. It is a selfish, interfering monster that will never be satisfied and will eventually suffocate the independence and autonomy of its subjects. And this monster is sustained by democracy: by the idea that the life of every human being may be controlled by the majority.

The fourth way is to spend someone else’s money on someone else. Then you have no reason to care about quality or cost. That is generally how government spends your tax money.

That sounds good in theory, but the reality is different. For example, we can assume that everyone is in favor of better education. Yet we’re not getting better education. What we get is harassed teachers, violence in schools, schools as learning factories, students who are no longer able to read, write, and do arithmetic — but not better education. How can this be? It’s not because of a lack of democracy; on the contrary, it is the result of how the democratic system works.

In many countries and states prostitution is illegal. Norwegian citizens are not even allowed to “purchase sex” outside Norway.

The so-called solidarity in a democracy is ultimately based on force. But enforced solidarity is really a contradiction. Solidarity to be real implies voluntary action. You can’t say that someone who is robbed on the streets shows solidarity with the robber, no matter how noble the robber’s motives.

The solution to the problem of the bus is simple. Let people decide for themselves where they want to go and with whom. Let people decide for themselves how they want to live, let them solve their own problems, form their own groups. Let them decide what to do with their bodies, minds, and money. A lot of our political “problems” will disappear like magic.

Democracy is like a bus full of people who must decide together where the driver will go. The progressives vote for San Francisco, the conservatives prefer Dallas, the libertarians want to go to Las Vegas, the Greens want to go to Woodstock, and the rest want to go in a thousand more, different directions. Eventually the bus arrives at a place where almost no one will want to be. Even if the driver has no self-interest and listens carefully to what the passengers want, he can never satisfy all their wishes. He has only one bus and there are almost as many wishes as there are passengers.

The real experts are in the schools and hospitals. They know most about their field of expertise and are best able to organize their institutions efficiently. And if they don’t do well, they simply won’t survive in a free market. For this reason, the quality of education and healthcare would improve, instead of deteriorate, without the interference of government. Bureaucracy, waiting lists, and overcrowded classrooms would disappear.

Another telling example can be seen in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) — which lists all laws enacted by the federal government. In 1925 this was just a single book. In 2010 it had mushroomed into more than 200 volumes, of which the index alone takes up more than 700 pages. It contains rules for everything under the sun — from how a watchband should look to how onion rings should be prepared in restaurants. Just during the presidency of George W. Bush, 1,000 pages of federal regulations were added each year, reports the Economist. According to the same magazine, from 2001 to 2010 America’s tax code grew from 1.4 million words to 3.8 million words.