Journal Entries #6

Democracy Threatens Freedom

Libertarians prize freedom, which they define as personal liberty, above all else.  But they also are suspicious, and sometimes outright hostile, to democracy and voting.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” the noted tech venture capitalist Peter Thiel wrote in 2009 in an essay for the libertarian Cato Institute.

What’s up? How is voting antithetical to personal liberty?

A clue can be found in this quote from the late philosopher Ayn Rand who inspires many of today’s libertarians: “Democracy, in short, is a form of collectivism, which denies individual rights: the majority can do whatever it wants with no restrictions. In principle, the democratic government is all-powerful. Democracy is a totalitarian manifestation; it is not a form of freedom . . . ”

We’ll take a deeper dive into libertarian philosophy later in the class, but a few examples here should suffice to explain their antipathy to democracy and the current American Political System.

Because libertarians prize personal liberty, they believe that a person owns their body, labor and ideas and that right can’t be taken away absent a person consenting to an abridgement of those rights. We can see some of that rationale in the Pro-Choice movement. A woman decides what to do with her body. So too libertarians believe that labor include the wages you earn for that labor. To a libertarian, being taxed by the government is morally equivalent to theft. It’s as if the government held a gun on you and said your money or liberty. To have that money, used without consent, to fund social programs is especially galling to libertarians.

Thiel continues: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”

Much of the rest of the essay focuses on his hopes for new spaces online, under the ocean and in outer space that might be free of politics and provide more freedom. He doesn’t clarify why extending the vote to women raises his ire.

Here are some excerpts from an essay by Will Wilkerson, a former libertarian who works for a conservative think tank. His essay critiques the libertarian challenge to democracy.  His references to “liberalism” refers to Classical Liberalism, the Enlightenment-era political philosophy that animated our founders, not contemporary political liberals. The full essay can be seen here. Links to an external site.

“Democracy, like a gun, is a tool that can be used for good or evil. James Madison … {was a} trigger-lock democrat…—as is anyone, left or right, who wants to take some issues off the table of democratic negotiation by constitutionalizing certain rights. A basic theme in the thought of market-friendly classical liberals is that robust economic rights are critical to a just, prosperous, and stable social order and deserve the same kind of democracy-constraining legal protections afforded to civil and political liberties. {Some thinkers} put a lot of thought and energy into tinkering with various constitutional trigger lock mechanisms that might, for example, check the unfortunate tendency of majoritarian democracies to wreck their national economies through inflation after voting themselves into unsustainable debt.

(I)f “taxation is theft,” it’s hard to have a government at all, and democratic bodies will be left without much to make decisions about. Libertarians of this stripe tend to see democracy as mechanism for some people to gang up on other people, press them into servitude, and steal their stuff. It’s institutionalized theft, two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.

”  … if democracy is a gun we might kill ourselves with, what’s so great about it? Why not just take away the gun? That’s a decent way to sum up the difference between the classical liberal and libertarian approach to democracy: gun safety versus disarmament.

…this can’t really solve the problem. Hardcore property-rights libertarians are chasing a fantasy—a legal perpetual motion machine capable of reinforcing and protecting the institutions of liberal capitalism by keeping politics from happening. A theory of rights that shrinks the scope of democratic choice to nearly nothing might seem like a clever way to resolve the worry that we will vote our way into serfdom. But it doesn’t resolve anything, because there’s no escape from politics. We don’t get to decide not to have it.

“Liberalism was forged in the crucible of the wars of religious toleration as a practical tool for accommodating and managing disagreement and conflict over the nature of God’s law. Liberalism is an answer to a political question: how can we possibly live together when we disagree about how to live? Representative democratic government eventually emerged as the critical liberal institutional mechanism for negotiating our differences in a way that sustains the legitimacy, stability, and peace of the political order. A theory of pre-political rights that answers all the important questions before the hurly-burly of politics can even get started denies the gravity of the problem of disagreement and ultimately undermines liberalism by forgetting the problem it solves.”