by Karel Beckman

People
around the world are fighting autocratic regimes in the name of
freedom and democracy. They are right to fight for freedom, but
wrong to fight for democracy. Libertarians should try to make it
clear to them that the democratic path will not lead to freedom,
but to slavery.

Most
libertarians no doubt sympathize with the courageous protests against
authoritarian regimes by ordinary people all over the world. Unlike
neoconservatives or liberals, libertarians are not worried when
protesters threaten the “stability” of some US-backed
client state. They have always warned that supporting dictatorships
leads to unwelcome “blowback”, since oppressed people
who revolt usually turn not only against their oppressors, but against
their western backers as well. Post World War Two history is full
of examples of this.

But
what are libertarians to think of the fact that those protesters
are usually fighting for (more) democracy? For it cannot be denied
that dissidents in authoritarian countries, like Russia, China,
Egypt, Tunisia, and the Persian Gulf States, demand democracy (“free
elections”) above all. Indeed, the first of the modern protesters,
in Tiananmen Square in 1989, were known as the ’89 Democracy Movement.

For
libertarians this presents a dilemma. Certainly since Hoppe published
his famous Democracy
– The God That Failed in 2001, libertarians have become
increasingly critical of the whole idea of democracy. You could
say that thanks to Hoppe they have re-discovered the fact that democracy
is in a very basic sense antithetical to liberty.

As
Hoppe and others have shown, democracy (“rule by the people”)
is not at all the same as liberty (“freedom of the individual”).
In a system in which “the people’ rule, all significant decisions
on all aspects of society are taken by “the people”, i.e.
by the democratically elected government that supposedly represents
the people, i.e. by the State. In such a system, people naturally
turn to the State to solve their problems or deal with all of society’s
ills. As a consequence – and because one intervention tends to lead
to another – the power of the State is steadily expanded.

This
is exactly what has happened in practice in democratic countries.
The advent of democracy has subverted rather than supported the
freedoms and rights people enjoy in western countries. The power
of the State has grown steadily in the last 100 to 150 years in
line with the steady growth of democratic principles in government.
In the 19th century, right up until the First World War, the tax
burden in the United States was a few percent at most, except in
times of war. Income tax didn’t exist and was even forbidden by
the Constitution.

But
as the United States were transformed from a decentralized, federal
state into a national parliamentary democracy, government power
steadily increased. Government spending in the US grew from about
7% in 1870 to 42% in 2010 (according to figures from The Economist).
Government spending and indebtedness are now totally out of control.
It is the same in all other western democracies.

The
sheer number of laws by which the government controls people has
mushroomed beyond anything that the Founding Fathers would be able
to imagine in their wildest dreams. The Code of Federal Regulations
(CFR) – which lists all laws enacted by the federal government –
grew
from just a single book in 1925 to more than 200 volumes in 2010,
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.

Even
worse, there are half
a million people behind bars in the US
just for “drug crimes”. No one is safe from law enforcers
these days; anyone can be locked up on any pretext. No “right”
is sacrosanct, neither the right to free speech nor the right to
private property.

And
there is no sign that things are getting better. As Lew Rockwell
once wrote: “Every day, our markets are less free, our property
less secure, our laws more arbitrary, our officials more corrupt
and the ideal of liberty a more distant memory.”

Rebellion
and revolution

Yet
this is not how those protesters look at democracy. They do associate
democracy with freedom. It is not difficult to see why.

What
people in dictatorial states probably want most of all is two things:
a decent standard of living, and control over their own lives –
over their environment, their careers, their social life. At present
they have no say over the laws that rule their lives. They have
no control over their property or environment. They cannot set up
a business without permission from corrupt bureaucrats. They have
no power over whether a dam gets built that will wipe away their
village or a polluting plant that will destroy their crops. And
they have no way to remove their rulers except through rebellion
and revolution.

In
democracy, they see a way to remedy all these ills. They believe
democracy will give them the means to choose their own rulers, to
help formulate the laws that govern them, to enable them to appeal
to independent courts when their rights are abused. And they believe
democracy will make them more prosperous.

These
beliefs are perfectly understandable. After all, in western, democratic
countries people do have some control over their lives. They are
able, to some extent, to reign in their rulers, or dispose of them
by means of the ballot box. They have more or less independent courts
they can appeal to if they believe their rights are violated. They
are to some extent free to move around, to go looking for a better
job, or a better life, elsewhere, if they want to (at least within
their own countries). And they tend to have a relatively high standard
of living.

Those
are the promises that democracy holds out to the oppressed people
of the world.

What
those oppressed people fail to realize, however, is that the freedom
and wealth people enjoy in most western countries are not due to
the fact that they are democracies, but to the fact that their democratic
systems were built on a classical-liberal foundation.

All
the freedoms that modern Americans enjoy (or used to enjoy) – private
property, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, independent courts,
limited powers of the rulers – were established by the Founding
Fathers after the American revolution (in part building on British
classical-liberal traditions). This was before the advent
of democracy as we know it today. And this is the same in other
western countries. First came individual freedom, only then came
the national democratic state.

In
newly to be formed democracies, like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, or,
who knows, China, where there is no tradition of classical-liberalism,
there is no reason to expect that the advent of democracy will lead
to (more) freedom. On the contrary. The “people” in those
new democracies will demand that the State take action to grant
their wishes. This will most likely lead to the creation of socialist,
nationalist and religious dictatorships.

At
the first free elections in Egypt, the liberal-secular parties that
instigated the Tahrir Square revolt, got only 7% of the vote. The
Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamic parties became the
biggest parties by far. In Tunisia the same thing happened. It seems
quite out of character for the Islamists to be ringing in a free
society. Much more likely they will do the reverse and subject the
entire society to sharia law.

Nor
is this an exclusively Arab or Islamic problem. In countries like
Venezuela, Thailand and Hungary, elected leaders have little intention
of establishing libertarian societies. In China too, if that country
became democratic, some highly nationalistic parties might rise
to the top.

So,
although proponents of democracy in the west are rightly hailing
the Arab Spring movement as a victory for democracy, it will probably
(perhaps with some exceptions) not turn out to be a victory for
freedom.

Of
course one may ask, don’t people like the Muslim Brotherhood have
the right control their own lives? To abide by the sharia, for instance,
if they want to? Well, yes. The problem is that in a democracy –
in a democratic nation-state – such people do not only rule their
own lives, they extend their rule over everyone in their society.
That’s how the democratic system works.

What
then should we as libertarians say to those courageous people out
there who face down guns and tanks in their struggle to be free?
Aren’t we letting them down if we say they should not fight for
democracy? No. Not if we explain that what they should fight for
is not democracy, but freedom. And that this means they should not
try to replace their authoritarian state with a national democratic
state, but that they should instead try to break away from their
state. They should try to create their own, decentralized, free
society, in a place of their own. Admittedly, it is not certain
whether the majority would let them, but then again, they might,
depending on the circumstances.

Come
to think of it, isn’t this also what we should be trying to do ourselves,
in the Western world?

June
25, 2012

Karel
Beckman [send him mail]
is co-author, with Frank Karsten, of a new and withering libertarian
analysis of democracy. In this book, Beyond
Democracy, they show in simple
terms, through 13 Myths, what is wrong with the democratic system,
and why democracy is fundamentally opposed to freedom. Beyond Democracy
can be ordered from Amazon in paperback
and Kindle.

Copyright
© 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.