The Limits to Public Opinion and the Failure of Democracy

by
Finn Andreen
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It is not often admitted, but it is nevertheless the case, that the people can be never successfully represented politically. However, public opinion influences politics, at times even strongly. In all political systems, the ruling minority must take into account, to varying degrees, the public mood as expressed in town halls, polls, elections, demonstrations, and now, social media.

The most stable and popular government is, therefore, not necessarily the most “democratic” one, but the one that best considers public opinion and adjusts its policies to it when needed. The unpopularity and political instability of most Western governments today is partly explained by the fact that public opinion has been ever-more disregarded by the ruling minority, while elections have turned into superficially “mediatized” rituals.

China’s political system is no friend of freedom, but it is stable and popular precisely because, according to a loyal Chinese academic, the Chinese Communist Party tries to “gauge the public’s pulse in governance and reflect the public will.” In the West, there is significant frustration coming from the fact that priority is always given to the political agenda of the now-cosmopolitan and financial oligarchy.

Though public opinion largely relies on common sense, it lamentably suffers from the prevailing ignorance about politics and economics. Stereotypes and confusions about the free market are common. As a result, the majority has long been influenced by the modern socialist ideas of state interventionism and forced socialization.

There is a common misunderstanding of the causality of social and economic problems. An example of this is free trade, which the majority generally does not support in the West, even though trade barriers act as a tax on the people, and benefit only certain politically-connected sectors or enterprises. The majority is harmed when the state raises tariffs to protect special interests, yet when it is aware of this fact, it does not object because it confuses its own interests with those of the ruling minority.

“How Can the People be Restricted?”

It is not surprising, therefore, that a large part of the economic elite in the West, in particular non-political business leaders, are rather more in favor of free markets and free trade than the rest of society. These people generally recognize that free market capitalism benefits not only themselves but society as a whole.

Indeed, a study of fifty years of minutes from the closed meetings of the Mont Pélerin Society shows that its members often expressed concerns that “democratic legislatures tend to disrupt the free market” by voting through welfare subsidies and social assistance. They asked therefore: “How can the people be restricted?”, since “democratic politics has the tendency to lead to interventions in the economy, thus distorting or even destroying the market mechanism.”

The question of restricting democracy came up because people tend to vote in ways that are contrary to their own interests in the long term, leading to economic stagnation and social decline with which they eventually would be deeply dissatisfied. This is obviously a highly relevant point for today’s Western societies.

What these gentlemen from the Mont Pélerin Society arrived at, by deduction, is the idea Hans-Hermann Hoppe expressed in Democracy: the God that Failed: that democracy introduces into society a tragedy of the commons. The majority often does not want public spending to be cut despite obvious signs of bureaucratic bloating and inefficiency. It tends to vote for further expansions of the welfare state, leading to increased taxation and redistribution, which, in turn, stifles the economy. This continues because the majority’s own tax burden is felt to be lower than the alleged value of the subsidies and social services it receives. Mass immigration obviously exacerbates this process, since the typical poor immigrant to the West has everything to gain and nothing to lose from such a voting strategy.

The Growth of the State

The advent of the “democratic” era is thus closely tied to the dramatic growth of the state since roughly the beginning of the 20th century. Democracy contributes to this bureaucratic growth since majorities vote for policies that require, or justify, a larger state. This cancerous statism in society can be measured by runaway numbers over time—tax revenues, public debt, public spending, and government employees.

Yet, to the majority’s rather foolish vexation, increased public spending does not automatically translate into more and better public services. On the contrary, according to the Baumol effect, the relative cost of services tends to increase, especially in non-market services of state administrations, all else being equal. And, according to Public Choice Theory, state employees’ incentives for good and fair management in the public interest are weak, leading to waste and inefficiency at best and corruption at worst.

Unfortunately, these points are not well known among the voting majority. As a result, many people underestimate how much they actually contribute financially to the state in comparison to what they receive from it. There is a naïve thoughtlessness regarding regressive taxes such as VAT and inflation. In 1845, Frédéric Bastiat already grasped these points when he saw taxation as theft: “to rob the public, it is necessary to deceive it. To deceive it is to persuade it that it is being robbed for its own benefit, and to induce it to accept, in exchange for its property, services that are fictitious or often even worse.”

Voting to Exchange Freedom for Security

Western societies have progressively voted to give up freedom for supposed security, provided by the state. Many were convinced that Herbert Marcuse was right at first, when he noted that the “the loss of economic and political liberties which were the real achievement of the preceding two centuries may seem slight damage in a state capable of making the administered life secure and comfortable.” Yet, though that may seem true briefly, life in a modern democracy cannot be “secure and comfortable” in the long term because of the “process of decivilization” described above.

Thus, the freedom to vote ironically contributes to the loss of economic liberty in the “democratic” West. This process runs counter to the prevailing opinion of equating democracy and freedom. Thus, this process is the opposite of Marx’s supposed “inherent contradictions” of capitalism: it is statist interventionism that leads to economic and social tensions, and that pushes society towards crisis and maybe even collapse.

This outcome becomes inevitable when more and more people in society are prevented from progressing economically, when they can no longer make ends meet, and when they are faced with mounting insecurity, decaying social services, and crumbling infrastructure. Either the nefarious effects of state interventionism—tragically boosted by the democratic process—become clear for the majority or else the downward spiral of wealth destruction and social decline will continue. Hopefully the ideas of freedom will become attractive again and the benefits of real capitalism will be understood, if the failure of democracy is finally exposed.