Isegoria

Gordon Tullock makes the case for not voting:

Robert Higgs prefers to call modern democracy participatory fascism:

This is a descriptively precise term in that it recognizes the fascistic organization of resource ownership and control in our system, despite the preservation of nominal private ownership, and the variety of ways in which the state employs political ceremonies, proceedings, and engagements—most important, voting—in which the general public participates. Such participation engenders the sense that somehow the people control the government. Even though this sense of control is for the most part an illusion, rather than a perception well founded in reality, it is important because it causes people to accept government regulations, taxes, and other insults against which they might rebel if they believed that such impositions had simply been forced on them by dictators or other leaders wholly beyond their influence.

For the rulers, participatory fascism is the perfect solution toward which they have been groping for generations, and virtually all of the world’s politico-economic orders are now gravitating toward this system. Outright socialism is a recipe for widespread poverty and for the ultimate dissolution of the economy and the disavowal of its political leadership. Socialism is the wave of the past; everywhere it has been tried seriously, it has failed miserably. Participatory fascism, in contrast, has two decisive advantages over socialism.

The first is that it allows the nominal private owners of resources and firms enough room for maneuver that they can still innovate, prosper, and hence propel the system toward higher levels of living for the masses. If the government’s intervention is pushed too far, this progress slows, and it may eventually cease or even turn into economic regress. However, when such untoward conditions occur, the rulers tend to rein in their plunder and intervention enough to allow a revitalization of the economy. Of course, such fettered economies cannot grow as fast as completely free economies can grow, but the latter system would preclude the plunder and control that the political leaders now enjoy in the fettered system, and hence they greatly prefer the slower-growing, great-plunder system to the faster-growing, no-plunder one.

Meanwhile, most people are placated by the economic progress that does occur and by their participation in political and legal proceedings that give them the illusion of control and fair treatment. Although the political system is rigged in countless ways to favor incumbent rulers and their key supporters, it is far from dictatorial in the way that Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany was dictatorial. People therefore continue to believe that they are free, notwithstanding the death of their liberties by a thousand cuts that continues day by day.

Participatory fascism’s second great advantage over socialism is that when serious economic problems do arise, as they have during the past five years, the rulers and their key supporters in the “private” sector can blame residual elements of the market system, and especially the richest people who operate in that system, for the perceived ills. No matter how much the problems arise from government intervention, it is always possible to lay the blame on actors and institutions in the remaining “free enterprises,” especially the biggest bankers and other apparent top dogs. Thus, fascistic rulers have build-in protection against popular reaction that the rulers in a socialist system lack. (Rulers under socialism tend to designate foreign governments and capitalists and domestic “wreckers” as the scapegoats for their mismanagement and inability to conduct economic affairs productively and fairly.)

(Hat tip to Aretae.)

Who does David Friedman want to win the election?

Gary Johnson, of course. But he isn’t going to.

The more interesting question is which of the two major party candidates I want to win. What I find interesting, looking at my own feelings, is that there are two different answers.

The rational answer is that the worst outcome might be Obama in control of both houses of Congress, but that that is very unlikely to happen. The second worst is probably Romney in control of both houses, a little more likely. Beyond those two, the order is unclear. On the one hand, my guess is that Obama would want to do more things I disapprove of than Romney. On the other, Romney, if elected, will almost certainly control the House and might control the Senate, or get control of it two years from now. What matters is not what people want to do but what they can do, and Romney might well be able to do more things I disapprove of than Obama.

A further argument is that when Romney talks a free market line but fails to act it, those of us who actually believe in free markets will get blamed for the resulting failures. That, after all, is what happened with the Bush administration. I do not expect either Obama’s policies or Romney’s to succeed, and if policies are going to visibly fail, I would prefer that they be blamed on someone else. That is an argument in favor of Obama.

Ideally, politics is about coming up with a set of understood compromises on issues trading off redistribution and efficiency, Eric Falkenstein says — but only ideally:

As most people have instincts on the long run effects of their favored policies but no definitive proof, people tend to be get very frustrated and emotional discussing these issues because we don’t like arguing about things we believe but can’t prove. I believe a smaller scale and scope of government would increase welfare, but alas my proof does not fit in a blog post (sort of like Fermat’s last theorem).

National politics is about convincing the demographic that votes for American Idol to agree with you.  When I used to teach at Northwestern University I occasionally asked what students thought about popular topics like  ’free trade’ or ‘market efficiency’. Their opinions were so poorly articulated and founded, I stopped doing that. It did not help to have people riff on subjects they really didn’t understand, the errors were so numerous and fundamental it simply was a waste of time.  I realized then that gaining their support would either rely on authority — believe me because I have these credentials — or slick salesmanship. Both methods are not good at converging upon truth. In the end I tried to explain some fundamental ideas showing why, given certain assumptions, one could think something was optimal, so the best case scenario was not definitive anyway.

Pure democracy leads to more concentrated power:

As collectives get larger — the USA, Roman Republic, Galactic Senate — power gets more concentrated in the President or Emperor. I think this is because when a state is small, an aristocracy/oligarchy is concentrated enough to work, but it doesn’t scale. At a certain point the aristocracy is fragmented but the titular head retains his power, which is then amplified by his new relative strength, making the legislative branch a veto at best, a patronage machine at worst. The House and Senate remain more powerful than the President, but they seem to lose stature every decade.