“America is the world’s most successful economy because it is a democracy”, sayeth Iain Martin. I am not convinced.
It is not a coincidence that the United States is such a success and a democracy. It is such a success because it is a democracy. Indeed, the American impulse is rooted in the rejection of tyranny and scepticism of excessive government power. That commitment to free competition – sometimes imperfect, often producing uneven results – is what drives innovation.
It is a point made brilliantly by Guy Sorman in his latest piece for CapX, published this week. As he says, if you want meaningful innovation, the lifeblood of technological improvement, rather than copying and refining existing technology, then you need that clash of ideas that happens in a free society in which those in charge can be kicked out or established players can be outflanked by upstarts.
But it is liberty, not democracy, that brings these things. It is constitutionally separated powers and limited government, which is to say limiting the scope for democratically impelled politics, that enables people to challenge established business models.
And those limits on what government can do are in precipitous decline in the USA (and elsewhere) regardless of ‘democracy’… and often because of it. A great many people are quite happy to vote for excessive government power and more ‘free stuff’ that other people will have to pay for.
Would it not be truer to say that it isn’t an absolute tyranny? I think Perry said much that. b
They won’t be able to vote for more government forever because eventually it throttles itself and everything else with it.
And this rock keeps tigers away.
It would be more accurate to say that the United States became the world’s number one economy (in spite of having a much smaller population than some other countries) because it was NOT a democracy.
Mr Martin confuses liberty (“suspicion of government power”) with democracy – and there is no excuse for that, as even Pericles (about two and half thousand years ago) used democracy to turn “the poor” against “the rich” and to loot the allies of Athens (turning them into enemies – to the ruin of Athens).
If two and half thousand years of experience of allowing people to vote themselves the money of other people has not registered with Mr Martin it is hard to know what would.
The United States limited its government with a Constitution – the Bill of Rights and so on shows no faith in the democratic principle of the Divine Right of the 51 per cent.
Corrupt courts have found ways round Constitutional limitations on government power.
For example pretending that there is a “general welfare spending power” – in fact the words “common defence and general welfare” in Article One, Section Eight are the PURPOSE of the specific powers that then follow.
And the United State has been in relative decline (as a percentage of the world economy) for about 65 years.
When will relative decline become absolute decline?
It will come if the politicians continue to loot the taxpayers.
But a word in defence of democracy.
As Douglas Carswell rightly argues in his recent book – the ordinary voters of Britain (and the same can be said of the United States) did NOT ask for the various government schemes that have been established.
Politicians and administrators established these schemes for essentially IDEOLOGIAL reasons – not because the voters asked for them.
People such as Chancellor David Lloyd George in Britain and Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and L.B. Johnson in the United States were NOT responding to public demands.
By the way for what an American traditionally means by the word “Republic” – see the speech of John Wayne’s character in the 1960 film “The Alamo”.
I suppose this shouldn’t need to be pointed out, but the US is affirmatively NOT a democracy. It is a republic, and the Constitution specifically requires that the federal government guarantee to each of the states a republican form of government. That is an important distinction, one which the progressives have been working tirelessly for a century to obscure. The word “democracy” never appears in our Constitution, and indeed our Founders abhorred the idea of a democracy. They understood the lessons of history.
And even if Martin is a product of our public schools and fails to understand that difference, Paul is correct: there is no excuse for conflating “liberty” with “democracy”. In a sense the two are antithetical; it is limitations on democracy (or on any other form of power) which permit liberty. As for promoting economic growth, I suspect that a constitutional monarchy or a constitutional oligarchy or any other form which limits the power of government would work just as well. And possibly even better, as it would eliminate the constant pressure to accede to the desires of the masses.
So while Martin is correct that freedom produces economic growth, and vaguely comprehends that it has something to do with limiting government, he clearly fails to grasp the source or true sustenance of that freedom.
Thank You Gentlemen – Laird & Marks
For years I have tried in any way I could to correct the ‘democracy’ tag regarding the United States.
Unfortunately, it is the ONLY word it seems that is used when talking about the United States by newscasters, schools at every level, town meeting and almost everything and everyone else where the subject of the United States as it relates to anything comes up !!!
Ask someone at random what a constitutional republic is and you will almost always get a
blank stare !
Laird,
Well, as usual, you come closer to the mark.
Over on LibertyLaw blog (part of the Liberty Fund site) there is commentary on a revue (Is The Republic Lost) of Jay Cost’s book A Republic No More.
As happens, the thread comes of the spool a bit.
But, some (not I) claim there is a “Representative Democracy.”
(See, below)
PdeH,
Of course, a word can be used or claimed for a label, arbitrarily.
So, I will offer again that Democracy is a process, not a condition. It is a process that can produce a variety of conditions – including the extinction of the process itself.
That is one of the places where today’s wordsmiths lose traction; in the failures to distinguish process from condition.
Freedom, however qualified or quantified is a condition. Where it is subject to social processes, including the democratic, it will be affected; but, freedom does not arise out of that process – or from any other political or social process.
Worth noting that Iraq and Afghanistan are considered “democracies”, but you’ll still be put to death for changing your religion, so much for liberty then. It was folly of the West when they put these democratic institutions into place into what are essentially tribal societies, like the false analogy that smarter children have more books therefore buying books makes the child smarter. What was needed was liberty, and democracy, or some form of it, would follow, and having a constitution based on a 7th century religion was not going to work out well.
Laird,
You are spot on. The American Founding Fathers did not trust democracy. With them the adjective “democratical” was not a term of praise or approbation. John Smith of Roanoke Virgina famously remarked “Too democratical a constitution will mean we have but exchanged King George for King Numbers” – so they built in checks and balances against the possiblility of a demogogue becoming a tyrant. I have not been able to source the following quote but it is attributed to Benjamin Franklin and sounds like him.
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the count”.
Edward, I’ve seen a variant of that quote attributed to James Bovard (“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner”), but the version you quote does have the ring of Franklin. The second sentence looks like something added by L. Neil Smith.
RRS, you are of course correct that democracy is a “process”, not a condition (as, indeed, is any other political system). But your corollary that freedom is a condition is an interesting one, and I hadn’t ever thought about it in quite that way. It seems correct, though. Thanks.
There is a theory that the US Constitution was broken by the Civil War and never healed.
The Constitution was written for a federation of sovereign states, and was most concerned about limiting the power of the federal government over those states. But once the freedom of the states to leave the union was abrogated by force, the USA became an essentially centralised state, with federal aspects to it. However, it has kept its original Constitution as if nothing has changed. The Founding Fathers would be appalled and ashamed at what became of their Republic.
I agree, JohnK. Prior to the Civil War the common practice, when referring to the nation, was to say “the United States are”; afterwards it became the practice to say “the United States is”. A subtle difference but a telling one.
America, that is, the USA, is NOT a “democracy”. It’s a representative republic based on the recognition of the primacy of INDIVIDUAL rights, not the majority rule of democracy. Majority rule is the diametric opposite of the primacy of individual rights. “Democracy” is Socialism…a tribe that operates via mob rule rather than a tribe that operates via the dictates of a chieftain.
Correlation between variables does not prove causality without evidence from outside data; if there is causality there must be correlation.
It is a simple enough concept but widly ignored or not understood, leading to geting cause and effect wrong way round, wrong and harmful policies.
Prosperity allows time for individuals to consider how they are governed and by whom, rather than slogging their guts out dawn to dusk just to grow enough to eat.
For those who cannot get their heads round the correlation/causality thing, there is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which demonstrated our first need is basics of survivial, when we have that we start devoting time to non-essentials/better quality life, then more thoughtful things.
Economic liberty is the basis out of which all other liberty and freedom grows.
Of course, there has actually never been such a thing as democracy. It is just unfeasible. Even in ancient Athens, only free men of Athenian descent were entitled to vote; and not all of them were as powerful as Themistocles or Pericles.
It is true, otoh, that there is a democratic element in modern “democracies”; as there is in republics (as the word was understood at least from Aristotle (politeia) to the Founding Fathers). That element is quite limited, for better or worse: what we are allowed to do is choose from a set of career politicians, all of whom have similar class interests. Once elected, the power of our “representatives” is pretty much limited to deciding how much more power to hand over to unelected bureaucrats. OK, maybe i am being too cynical, but it’s for emphasis.
In addition, in the US in particular, photo IDs are not required to vote.
Until about twenty years ago, I assumed that when people used the word democracy they were normally using it as a short form for the phrase liberal democracy, which means something much closer to what Americans mean when they describe their country as a republic. I was a bit shocked when I began to realize that a lot of people used the term merely to mean popular government, and that they thought popular government was a good idea.
I would have thought that the 20th century experiments with fascism would have killed the notion of popular government once and for all. Since it didn’t, it makes me wonder just exactly what lesson these people did take from WWII. They surely must think there was something to learn from it but, if not that, then what?
The same people decrying the overthrow of the Islamic Brotherhood or the Kremlin’s boy in Kyiv would no doubt have been appalled if looking back at the history of some alternate reality, seen that in 1938 the Wehrmacht conducted a coup d’etat against the democratically elected German government and thereby prevented WW2.
Meanwhile British Lefties want to make voting compulsory for the young.
In German, Zwangfreiheit might be a term for it, ‘compulsory freedom’.
I might vote for this, but only on the basis of linking it to a Bill of Attainder for those who propose it.
Exactly, Perry. It continues to amaze me that intelligent people could think that popular government will save us from those kinds of disasters. And yet many do.
For the record, the lesson I thought we were all supposed to take from WWII was that the kind of thing that happened in Germany lurks just beneath the surface of all societies (at best), and that it is only our commitment to valuing each person as an individual, distinct from categories we might want to stick them in (such as ethnicity), that can shield us from it. The only alternative is to believe that there was something unique about German people, an idea that is contrary to both historical fact and liberalism.
To believe in popular government is, in effect, to adopt that ahistorical and illiberal belief.
I would be in favor of a compulsory vote if every issue and office we were voting for necessarily required an option for ‘None of the Above’.
How about the option of a negative vote, where you could cancel out a vote for, say, a socialist to stop the most evil candidate but forego your choice of candidate? A true protest vote.
Of course, as long as we have a secret ballot you can always pop a blank slip into the ballot box without anybody knowing better. I suppose we might eventually have an electronic voting situation where you have to vote for candidate A-Z before you are let out of the booth. There is always the Monster Raving Looney party.
They had (might still do) a system in Sweden, where you vote for a party (proportional representation basis), and also have the option of ranking representatives from that party. I remember my mother voted for the social democratic party, and elected to move one of their candidates from the top of the list to the bottom, because he had no work experience outside of politics.
My way of voting is not to vote, and that is not negotiable.