It is not often admitted, but it is nevertheless the case, that people can never be successful REPRESENTATIVE political. However, public opinion influences politics, sometimes even strongly. In all political systems, the ruling minority must take into account, to varying degrees, the public mood expressed in town halls, polls, elections, demonstrations and now, social media.

The most stable and most popular government is therefore not necessarily the most “democratic”, but the one that best takes public opinion into account and adapts its policies to it when necessary. The unpopularity and political instability of most Western governments today is partly explained by the fact that public opinion has been increasingly disregarded by the ruling minority, while elections have turned into superficially “publicized” rituals.

China’s political system is no friend to freedom, but it is stable and popular precisely because, conformable for one loyal Chinese academic, the Chinese Communist Party seeks to “measure the pulse of the public in governance and reflect the will of the public”. In the West, there is significant frustration that priority is always given to the now cosmopolitan political and financial agenda. oligarchy.

Although public opinion is largely based on common sense, it suffers sadly from the prevailing ignorance of politics and economics. Stereotypes and confusions about the free market are common. As a result, the majority has long been influenced by modern socialist ideas of state interventionism and forced socialization.

There is a common misunderstanding of CAUSALITY of social and economic problems. An example of this is free trade, which most generally do I can’t stand it in the West, even if trade barriers work as a tax on people and benefit only certain sectors or enterprises with political connection. The majority is injured when the state raises tariffs to protect special interests, but, when aware of this fact, does not oppose it because it confuses its own interests with those of the ruling minority.

“How can people be restricted?”

It is therefore not surprising that much of the economic elite in the West, especially non-political business leaders, are more in favor of free markets and free trade than the rest of society. These people generally recognize that free market capitalism benefits not only themselves but society as a whole.

Indeed, a study of fifty years of minutes from closed meetings of Mont Pélerin Society shows that its members often expressed concern that “democratic legislatures tend to disrupt the free market” by voting through welfare and welfare. They therefore asked: “How can the people be restrained?”, since “democratic politics tends to lead to interventions in the economy, thus distorting or even destroying the market mechanism.”

The problem of narrowing democracy has arisen because people tend to vote in ways that are counterproductive own long-term interests, leading to economic stagnation and social decline which they would ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with. This is obviously a highly relevant point for Western societies today.

What these gentlemen of the Mont Pélerin Society arrived at, by deduction, is the idea expressed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in Democracy: The God That Failed: that democracy introduces into society a the tragedy of the commons. Most often do i don’t want public spending to be reduced despite obvious signs of bureaucratic bloat and inefficiency. It tends to vote for further expansions of the welfare state, leading to increased taxation and redistribution, which in turn chokes the economy. This continues because the majority’s own tax burden is felt to be less than the supposed value of the subsidies and social services they receive. Mass immigration obviously exacerbates this process, since the typical poor immigrant in the West has everything to gain and nothing to lose from such a voting strategy.

Growth of the state

The emergence of the “democratic” era is thus closely linked to the dramatic growth of the state from around the turn of the 20th century. Democracy contributes to this bureaucratic growth because majorities vote for policies that require or justify a larger state. This cancerous statism in society can be measured by fugitive numbers over time – tax revenues, public debt, public spending and government employees.

However, to the rather silly chagrin of the majority, increased public spending does not automatically translate into more and better public services. On the contrary, according Baumol effectthe relative cost of services tends to rise, especially in the non-market services of state administrations, all else being equal. And according to Public choice theorythe incentives of state employees for good and fair management in the public interest are weak, leading to waste and inefficiency at best and corruption at worst.

Unfortunately, these points are not well known among the voting majority. As a result, many people underestimate how much they actually contribute financially to the state compared to what they receive from it. There is a naive thoughtlessness about regressive taxes such as VAT and inflation. In 1845, Frédéric Bastiat already grab these points when he saw taxation as theft: “to rob the public, you must deceive them. To deceive him is to convince him that he is being robbed for his own benefit, and to induce him to accept, in exchange for his property, fictitious services, or often worse.”

I vote to trade freedom for security

Western societies have progressively voted to give up freedom for the supposed security provided by the state. Many were convinced that Herbert Marcuse was right at first when he RECORDED that “the loss of economic and political liberties, which have been the real achievement of the last two centuries, may seem slight damage to a state capable of making administered life safe and comfortable.” However, while this may seem true in the short term, life in a modern democracy cannot be “safe and comfortable” in the long term because of “decivilization process” described above.

Thus, the freedom to vote ironically contributes to the loss of economic freedom in the “democratic” West. This process contradicts the prevailing view of equating democracy with freedom. Thus, this process is the opposite of Marx’s alleged “inherent contradictions” of capitalism: it is statist interventionism that leads to economic and social tensions and pushes society toward crisis and perhaps even collapse.

This result becomes inevitable when more and more people in society are prevented from progressing economically, when they can no longer cope and when they face increasing insecurity, declining social services and crumbling infrastructure . Either the ill effects of state interventionism – tragically driven by the democratic process – become clear to the majority, or the downward spiral of wealth destruction and social decline will continue. Hopefully the ideas of freedom will become attractive again and the benefits of real capitalism will be understood if the failure of democracy is finally revealed.