Democracy As Pseudo-Savior

The road to the restoration of liberty is going to be long and fraught with ups and downs. Many don’t even know that our liberties are being usurped and that statism has arrived. Some don’t want to know because they are our “weaker brethren,” and they prefer to just “believe” everything will cruse along as it always has, no problems. Others are gleeful for the “change” and “hope” of a better and more “just” American. A little redistribution of wealth can’t be all that bad since many of them will be the recipients of the legal plunder of those who are being plundered. Many don’t even have a grasp of the history of the human struggle for freedom so the context to really understand what is happening isn’t even on their radar screen.

It almost seems impossible to know where to begin in the struggle in which we find ourselves. To make any progress we must first identify the struggle. That struggle is to throw off the “chains” that increasingly bind our freedoms. The “chains,” which are ever increasing in their weight and tightness, is the ever growing federal government which is covered in the sheepskin of “democracy.” James Bovard, in his introduction to his book, “Freedom in Chains,” does an excellent job of giving us a clear picture of the “road to serfdom” and how dangerous the times really are. Once we begin to see where the cancer of tyranny is, we can begin to chart a course of action to navigate out of the dangerous waters of socialism to the safe harbors of freedom.

I must add, however, the sky’s are growing darker everyday, clouding the light of liberty, therefore, don’t just read this piece, but think about the consequences of the failure of democracy, and then help your neighbor by introducing him/her to the freedom philosophy as well. For Freedom’s Sake.

Democracy As Pseudo-Savior*

Nowadays, “democracy” serves mainly as a sheepskin for Leviathan, as a label to delude people into thinking that government’s big teeth will never bite them. Voting has changed from a process by which the citizen controls the government to a process that consecrates the government’s control of the people. Elections have become largely futile exercises to reveal comparative popular contempt for competing professional politicians. The question of who nominally bolds the leash has become far more important that whether government is actually leashed.

The ability to push a lever and register a protest once every few years is supposedly all the protection citizens’ liberties need – or deserve. Americans are implicitly taught in government schools that they will be able to control their government, regardless of how large it becomes. But the bigger government grows, the more irrelevant the individual voter becomes. The current theory of democracy is a relic of an era when government was a tiny fraction of its current size. The illusion of majority rule is now the great sanctifier of government abuses – and perhaps the single greatest barrier to people understanding the nature of government. No amount of patriotic appeals can hide the growing imbalance between the citizen’s power to bind the government and the government’s power to bind the citizen. Does the appearance of someone’s name on a ballot for political office automatically entitle that person to dispose of 38 percent of any voter’s income?

Rather than “government by the people,” we now have Attention Deficit Democracy. Less than half of the voters show up at the polls; less than half of the voters who do show up understand the issues; and politicians themselves are often unaware of what lurks in the bills they vote for. The larger government becomes, the less democratic it will tend to be, simply because people become less able to comprehend and judge the actions of their rulers. The great issue for modern democracy is whether politicians can fool enough of the people enough of the time to continue expanding their power over everyone.

Modern democracy is now largely an overglorified choice of caretakers and cage keepers. Are citizens still free after they vote to make themselves wards of the State? Supposedly, as long as citizens are permitted to push the first domino, they are still self-governing – regardless of how many other government domino’s subsequently fall on their heads. Democracy is further corrupted by a demagogy that portrays a right to vote as a license to steal.

*James Bovard, “Freedom In Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), pp. 3-4.