The problem is not DEMOCRACY (the choice of leadership) but the combination of:
- DISCRETIONARY RULE, where leaders can legislate (issue commands) anything that the public will allow them to, rather than RULE OF LAW, under NATURAL LAW, where (like our trial-run original constitution) they can only construct otherwise legal contracts between members of the polity on their behalf. Much legislation is not (objectively) LEGAL in the sense that it violates NATURAL LAW: the preservation of the incentive to cooperate by the requirement for productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchanges, limited to productive externalities.
And 2) UNIVERSAL ENFRANCHISEMENT rather than demonstrated ability earning enfranchisement. But unlike Plato and Socrates, recommend, it’s not EDUCATION that demonstrates wisdom, but ACHIEVEMENT in life. Why? Because the reason we no longer possess RULE OF LAW, and are the victims of DISCRETIONARY RULE is the fault of the academy’s teaching of social pseudoscience for 140 years. So conversely, how do we know we are in fact ‘educating’ rather than ‘deceiving’? I am not the first philosophy to suggest that the 20th century will be remembered as an era of pseudoscience and the refutation of democracy – because of the failure of the academy. So the reason our ancestors required PROPERTY(demonstrated ability) and military service (warranty or ‘skin in the game’) was that together they DEMONSTRATED knowledge and investment, they didn’t ‘imagine’ that they were knowledgeable, because they had an education, or ‘imagine’ people were moral – they wanted empirical EVIDENCE OF IT. For a criticism of the university systems see either Sowell’s work on education and intellectuals, or See Kaplan’s work on the fallacy of the rational voter, and his work on Universities: there is very little evidence that universities do anything more than filter by workload. They teach almost nothing that produces outcomes other than fitness for workloads.
- MONOPOLY COMMONS. All MONOPOLIES are ‘bad’ because they prohibit innovation, and they allow us to violate the Natural Law of Cooperation. Yet majoritarian democracy produces a monopoly. There is no reason why Seattle must choose between a Monorail and a Train, when they can choose both and let the best solution win. The excuse is efficiency. But this is a deception. Instead, the competition will force voters to pay for that which is most likely to succeed not what they themselves want at the expense of others – and that is more efficient. The purpose of majoritarian democracy is to legitimize authority – to rubber stamp the oligarchy’s choices. Majoritarian democracy is possible for the selection of priorities among people with common interests (farmers), where resources are scarce.
But markets (contracts) are the solution to heterogeneous polities with disparate or competing interests (like ours today), where expenditures of resources are plentiful (surpluses are possible) must be constrained in order to prevent expansion of debt. So instead of single house majoritarian democracy, our ancestors created houses for each class, so that classes could construct exchanges, rather than rule over one another. They created a MARKET for the construction of COMMONS between the classes, just as they had created a market for the consumption of goods and services: cities. Just as they had created a market for leadership by voting. Just as they had created a market for dispute resolution that we call the ‘independent judiciary’ under ‘rule of law’.
So you see, democracy can function as a market if and only if we restore market institutions, instead of market-violating institutions: multiple houses of government (families, businesses, territories, monarchy-as-vote-of-last-resort-by-veto, and then we can have democracy. Otherwise democracy is just a means by which to fraudulently legitimize the formation of tyranny by monopoly.
Why this is so difficult? Because the academy teaches pseudoscience, not social science.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine