Thursday, August 11, 2011
Is this true about democracy?
Imagine, for a moment, that grocery shopping was decided by a coercive democracy. You are forced to buy whatever foods the majority tells you to. The best you can do is cast your vote for what you want to buy and hope for the best. But because of the very nature of democracy, what will most likely happen is that a one-size-fits-all solution will be imposed and everyone will end up being forced to buy many foods they do not want and be prevented from buying many foods they do want! And representative democracies make this problem even worse, since instead of being able to vote on specific foods, you are now only able to vote on specific people with their own list of foods they think you should eat. That is to say you may very well not want 99% of the foods this guy wants you to eat, but you vote for him anyway since he will at least give you 1% more of the foods you want than the other guy. Compare this to a voluntary system of grocery shopping, where you are allowed to buy what you specifically want, and you can see the unnecessary waste and conflict that a coercive democracy naturally brings. Rather than focusing on the voluntary means of exchange, innovation, and efficiency in order to increase prosperity for everyone, democracy incentivizes everyone to instead bicker with each other over which group of people should be allowed to exploit the other. The irony is that the distorted incentives that legalized coercion creates are what sow the seeds for the very doomsday scenarios that voluntarism is feared to bring.
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