Myths of "civic duty," "the common good," and "the consent of the governed" prevent the pigs at the trough not only from grasping their status as charcuterie menu items, but their own aspirations as charcutiers.--The Flogger
Hans-Hermann Hoppe on Democracy as State’s Preferred Method of Maximizing Income
From A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Kluwer Academic, 1989, pp. 158-161
An ordinary profit-oriented business would try to adopt a decision-making structure best suited to its goal of maximizing income through the perception and implementation of entrepreneurial opportunities, i.e., differences in production costs and anticipated product demand.
The state, in comparison, faces the entirely different task of adopting a decision-making structure which allows it to increase maximally its coercively appropriated income—given its power to threaten and bribe persons into supporting it by granting them special favors.
I submit that the best decision-making structure for doing so is a democratic constitution, i.e., the adoption of majority rule. In order to realize the validity of this thesis, only the following assumption need be made.
Not only the persons actually representing the state have the desire . . . to increase their income at the expense of a corresponding income reduction of natural owners, producers, and contractors. This lust for power and the desire to rule others also exists among the people governed.
Not everyone has this desire to the same extent. Indeed, some people might never have it. But most people have it quite normally on recurring occasions. If this is so . . ., then the state must reckon with resistance from two analytically distinct sources.
On the one hand there is resistance by the victims which any state policy creates. The state can try to break this up by making supportive friends. And indeed it will succeed in doing so to the extent that people can be corrupted through bribery.
On the other hand, if lust for power exists among the victims and/or the persons favored by a given state policy, then there must also be resistance or at least discontent originating from the fact that any given policy of expropriation and discriminatory distribution automatically excludes any other such policy with its advocates in the state-ruled population, and hence must frustrate their particular plan of how power should be used.
By definition, no change in the expropriation-redistribution policy of the state can eliminate this sort of discontent, as any change would necessarily exclude a different policy. Thus, if the state wants to do something to reduce the resistance . . . that any one particular policy implies, it can only do so by adopting a decision-making structure which minimizes the disappointment of potential power wielders: by opening up a popular scheme of participating in decision-making, so that everyone lusting for his particular power policy can hope to have a shot at it in the future. . . .
Contrary to popular myth, the adoption of a democratic constitution has nothing to do with freedom or justice. Certainly, as the state restrains itself in its use of aggressive violence when engaging in the provision of some positively valued goods and services, so it accepts additional constraints when the incumbent rulers subject themselves to the control of the majority of those being ruled.
Despite the fact, though, that this constraint fulfills the positive function of satisfying certain desires of certain people by reducing the intensity of the frustrated lust for power, it by no means implies the state’s forsaking its privileged position as an institution of legalized aggression.
Rather, democratizing the state is an organizational measure undertaken for the strategic purpose of rationalizing the execution of power, thereby increasing the amount of income to be aggressively appropriated from natural owners. The form of power is changed, but majority rule is aggression, too.
In a system based on the natural theory of property—under capitalism—majority rule does not and cannot play any role . . . . In such a system, only the rules of original appropriation of goods through use or contractual acquisition from previous owners are valid.
Appropriation by decree or without a previous user-owner’s consent regardless of whether it was carried out by an autocrat, a minority against a majority, or by a majority against a minority is without exception an act of aggressive violence.
What distinguishes a democracy from an autocracy, monarchy, or oligarchy is not that the former means freedom, whereas the others mean aggression. The difference between them lies solely in the techniques used to manage, transform, and channel popular resistance fed by the frustrated lust for power.
