by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Imagine a world government, democratically elected according to the principle of one-man-one-vote on a world wide scale. What would the probable outcome of an election be? Most likely, we would get a Chinese-Indian coalition government. And what would this government most likely decide to do in order to satisfy its supporters and be reelected? The government would probably find that the so-called Western world had far too much wealth and the rest of the world, in particular China and India, had far too little, and hence, that a systematic wealth and income redistribution would be called for. Or imagine, for your own country, that the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds. While the government would not likely be made up of children, its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adaequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ hamburgers, lemonade, and videos.
In light of these ‘thought experiments’, is there any doubt about the consequences which resulted from the process of democratization that began in Europe and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century and has come to fruition since the end of World War I? The successive expansion of the franchise and finally the establishment of universal adult suffrage did within each country what a world democracy would do for the entire globe: it set in motion a seemingly permanent tendency toward wealth and income redistribution.
One-man-one-vote combined with ‘free entry’ into government – democracy – implies that every person and his personal property comes within reach of – and is up for grabs by – everyone else. A ‘tragedy of the commons’ is created. It can be expected that majorities of ‘have-nots’ will relentlessly try to enrich themselves at the expense of minorities of ‘haves’. This is not to say that there will be only one class of have-nots and one class of haves, and that the redistribution will be uniformly one from the rich onto the poor. To the contrary. While the redistribution from rich to poor will always play a prominent role everywhere, it would be a sociological blunder to assume that it will be the sole or even the predominant form of redistribution. After all, the ‘permanently’ rich and the ‘permanently’ poor are usually rich or poor for a reason. The rich are characteristically bright and industrious, and the poor typically dull, lazy, or both. It is not very likely that dullards, even if they make up a majority, will systematically outsmart and enrich themselves at the expense of a minority of bright and energetic individuals. Rather, most redistribution will take place within the group of the ‘non-poor’, and frequently it will actually be the better-off who succeed in having themselves subsidized by the worse-off. Just think of the almost universal practice of offering a ‘free’ university education, whereby the working class, whose children rarely attend universities, is made to pay for the education of middle-class children! Moreover, it can be expected that there will be many competing groups and coalitions trying to gain at the expense of others. There will be various changing criteria defining what it is that makes one person a ‘have’ (deserving to be looted) and another a ‘have-not’ (deserving to receive the loot). At the same time, individuals will be members of a multitude of groups of ‘haves’ and/or ‘have-nots’, losing on account of one of their characteristic and gaining on account of another, with some individuals ending up net-losers and others net-winners of redistribution.
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- The Illusion of Democracy to Depopulate the Planet: Voting For Your Own Death Sentence
- Billionaires Flourish, Inequalities Deepen as Economies “Recover”
- Susan Lindauer – Warning: This Message Contains Democracy!
- Western Democracy: A Farce And A Sham
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