-Caveat Lector-
~~for educational purposes only~~
[Title 17 U.S.C. section 107]
Will of the People?
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
The state needs to invent an endless series of
myths about its powers and importance in order to
exist, and there is no bigger myth than the notion
that democratic governments are mere expressions
of "the will of the people." No matter how heinous
the deeds performed by democratic governments,
no matter how much property they steal or people
they kill at home and abroad, the basic institutions
of the state are almost never challenged because
they supposedly enjoy the support of "the will of
the people."
Market entrepreneurs are successful only if they
cater to the will of the people, i.e., customers.
But in politics exactly the opposite is true: Success
in politics is determined by the extent to which
political "entrepreneurs" can subvert the will of
the people and operate without constraint.
Nearly every act of every legislature is the result
of "logrolling," a principal means of subverting the
will of the people. For example, consider a hypothetical
situation where there are only three voters in a
community. Voter A prefers more government spending
on schools, but nothing else. Voter B prefers more
government spending on hospitals, but not on schools
or anything else. Voter C is satisfied with the status
quo. No proposal for spending more on either schools
or hospitals can command a two-thirds majority, yet
the usual outcome is more spending on both schools
and hospitals by the simple expedient of logrolling.
Voter A (or his representative) can simply say, "I
don't want more hospital spending, but I'll vote for
it if you, voter B, agree to vote for more school
spending." The true will of the majority is no
more spending on anything, yet the actual outcome
is more spending on everything.
Modern government is much too large for any citizen
to possess knowledge about anything other than a
miniscule percentage of its activities. Moreover,
the average citizen is "rationally ignorant": he
has little incentive to become informed about the
activities of government, for he spends most of
his time earning a living, educating himself,
raising his family, etc. To make matters worse,
the state, its media lapdogs, and its court
intellectuals comprise a vast propaganda apparatus
designed to confuse the voters about what the state
is really up to (primarily legalized plunder and the
form of mass murder called "war'). Every politician,
and every bureaucrat, is a consummate propagandist.
This means that what little the average, rationally
ignorant citizen does know about government tends to
be mostly lies and statist propaganda. We are told
that welfare is needed to reduce poverty, yet as
Charles Murray proved in Losing Ground, success
against poverty was reversed in the U.S. at precisely
the moment the government declared "war" on it and
greatly increased welfare expenditures.
We are told that farm subsidies are needed to "save
the small family farm," yet the big majority of the
subsidies go to large corporate enterprises. We have
been told for more than a century that we are about
to run out of energy, perhaps the most blatant of all
Official Lies.
There is barely a word of truth in all the
government-funded environmental propaganda, from acid
rain to the ozone layer, to global warming hysterics.
The federal government annually announces that it is
winning the war on drugs, a lie that no responsible
adult could possibly believe. And then there are the
government propaganda mills known as "public schools,"
which have brainwashed generations of children into
becoming docile supporters of the state. What all of
this means is that government at all levels devotes
enormous energy and resources to manufacturing the
will of the people, not merely responding to it.
For more than a century, political "entrepreneurs"
have also subverted the will of the people by creating
thousands of "off-budget enterprises," as James Bennett
and I showed in our book, Underground Government: The
Off-Budget Public Sector. At the state and local levels
of government, politicians frequently respond to
citizen demands for budgetary restraint or debt
limitation by paying lip service to "the will of the
people" while simultaneously subverting that will with
myriad off-the-books spending schemes. At the federal
level, hundreds of billions of dollars in spending are
hidden by the Federal Financing Bank, which places
billions of dollars of spending off budget annually,
and by the subsidized lending practices of various
"government-sponsored enterprises."
Congress has so rigged congressional elections that
in the year 2000 fully 98 percent of all incumbents
were reelected. It is almost impossible for a challenger
to compete with incumbents who enjoy dozens of
taxpayer-financed staff members who are really campaign
workers; positions on congressional subcommittees that
allow them to ladle out pork to their constituents;
taxpayer-subsidized mailing privileges that are used
to distribute campaign propaganda; the ability to use
one's position on a powerful committee to extract
bribes (euphemistically called "campaign contributions")
from various industries; and millions of dollars in
"contributions" from political action commitees.
Because of these monopolisti advantages, the idea that
electoral competition causes politicians to cater to
the wishes of the median voter, as some public choice
theorists maintain, is a myth.
Government has become the master, not the servant, of
the people, even under democracy. Unless we want to
live our lives as serfs, working for half the year or
longer to feed the voracious appetites of the tax
collectors, the powers of the state need to be scaled
back as much as is humanly possible. The free market
is the only institution about which it can be said
that the will of the people is satisfied.
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