Democracy is the system of government in which policies and laws are decided by the voting process. Whatever proposed law gets the majority votes wins and is established and enforced. In effect the majority rule over the minority. The champions of democracy are proud of its care of individual rights and its trustworthy government powered by the people. Democracy is defended and spread by American troops. It comes in different styles and forms but it all comes down to majority rule. It is held as the best option we’ve got. However if we take a close look at democracy it suffers from a number of failures. Here are five reasons democracy isn’t great.
Majority is relative
I’m sure your mom has asked you the question, “If all your friends jumped off a bridge then would you too?” Just because the majority of people agree on something doesn’t make it ethical or even smart and it certainly doesn’t make it worthy of becoming law. There is nothing inherently moral about majority opinion. It becomes incredibly arbitrary when you have to decide which majority rules. The majority is only based on meaningless lines drawn on a map. Who decides where that line is drawn? Murray Rothbard has an excellent assessment in his work Man, Economy and State:
“For if someone contends that the majority in Country X should govern that country, then it could be argued with equal validity that the majority of a certain district within Country X should be allowed to govern itself and secede from the larger country, and this subdividing process can logically proceed down to the village block, the apartment house, and, finally, each individual, thus marking the end of all democratic government through reduction to individual self-government.”
The argument could go the other way too. Why is Country X allowed to rule itself by majority? What if the majority outside of Country X votes that they shouldn’t rule as a sovereign nation? The majority of the entire population of the world should be able to out-vote any single country and we should have a massive world government that accounts for the true majority. Democracy has to be all or nothing or else it’s arbitrary.
What gives majority the right?
Of course majority influence isn’t the biggest issue here: no matter what type of society you live in the majority have a powerful say in what goes on; you can’t get around that. The issue is that democracy falsely gives the majority the right to rule over the minority. You as an individual have the right to have your opinions and live your life based on those but you don’t have the right to vote your opinion into a law and force other people to live by it regardless of how many people agree with you.
Say you go out to dinner with a group of friends and once you’ve all finished you leave to go to the bathroom. When you come back, your friends inform you that they voted on who should pay and everyone voted that you should pay. This doesn’t give them the legitimate right to take your money to pay for dinner. What if you decided you didn’t want to pay for everyone? Here's an interview that makes a good point about the illogical idea of group rights. The journalist also interviewed Bernie Sanders years ago. It’s a little awkward to watch because Sanders doesn’t answer his questions directly. But both get to the point of rights. Can you delegate a right you do not have?
Majority doesn’t even decide
The thing that’s even more ridiculous is that democracy doesn’t even require the majority of the people affected by a law to agree on it in order to pass it. It merely needs the majority of votes. So not only does democracy say it’s fine for the majority to rule over the minority it says that in some cases the minority can rule everyone too.
For example, not everybody votes. Lets say 100 people are able to vote on some law but only 60 people actually vote. Of those 60 who voted, 35 voted in favor and won the majority. Now, according to democracy, the opinion of those 35 people is law and is forced on the rest of the 100 people. In this situation the minority ruled over the majority.
This isn’t hypothetical either. This happens. In 2012 there were 219 million eligible voters in the U.S. Of those, 126 million voted (about 57.5%). Of those who voted it was split pretty even: Obama 51.1% to Romney’s 47.2%. Obama won with almost 66 million votes. 66 million is a little over a third of the eligible voters. I didn’t even mention that the population of the U.S. at the time was around 314 million, which means that a measly fourth of the population of the U.S. decided the outcome of the race. All hail democracy.
Even Representatives don’t fix “voter ignorance”
One criticism of pure democracy is that the people are not learned enough to be able to vote intelligibly on all of the issues and so what we use is the representative democracy in which the people elect individuals to vote on the issues. This assumes that people are not capable of voting on the issues intelligibly but somehow assumes they are able of choosing people intelligibly in which case they would have to know something about the issues and what the person thinks of those issues. That adds to the information that a voter has to know. Before a voter just had to have an opinion now a voter has to have an opinion and hopefully find somebody who shares those opinions. That is an increase in the amount of information one has to know.
It is also far fetched to think that the representatives would be trustworthy. They have every incentive to loot the treasury before they get kicked out of office. Constantly electing new officials leads to shortsightedness where the officials are only concerned with getting reelected and getting enough loot to set them up for the rest of their lives. No politician is bound to the things they say when they run for office, they can say whatever they want while running in order to get votes. Rothbard also points out,
“the candidates are people whom he cannot possibly know personally and whom he therefore knows essentially nothing about. Hence, he can vote for them only on the basis of their external ‘personalities,’ glamorous smiles, etc., rather than on their actual competence.”
Let’s say I’m a businessman with a factory. I want a nice direct road from my factory to the store the road would cost $50,000 to build. I am not willing to pay that much so I go down to the friendly neighborhood politician and offer him a bribe of $15,000 to build my road. The politician isn’t paying for the road with his own money so he wouldn’t be losing any money if he built the road. He takes the bribe and uses taxpayer money to build a road that they wouldn’t have wanted to pay for. Since all government spending is money not earned but taken it leads to irresponsible spending and corruption. This video explains one of the fiscal downfalls of capitalism in just about 2 minutes.
No way to vote No
There’s no way to vote your nuanced and complex opinion. There are only options given to voters and all they can do is vote for which one they prefer. It cannot be said that choosing between evils is a clear and eager yes!
If someone holds two types of gum out in front of you and asks which one you like and you don’t even like gum but you pick the one that’s not pickle-flavored it can’t be said that you want that gum. It’s certainly not right to force you to chew that gum for the next four years.
In addition to your vote there are millions of other people who will be saying which gum they prefer and then you’ll be forced to have the gum that is the most popular. But you should be proud of your right to say what you prefer. You have a voice. Except when you are part of the minority. Or when you want to refuse the options altogether.
Think about all those millions of people who didn't vote back in 2012. You don't know why they didn't vote! Maybe somebody was prevented because of sickness or maybe they have a way better idea that is an alternative to what we've got! Do those peoples voice matter? People claim you have voice in democracy but it's troubling when the only voice you have is a little x in a box.
A bonus reason is that democracy is divisive; it pits populations against each other in a battle for rights. People vote out of fear that they will lose their rights if they don’t vote. My main man Lysander Spooner cut to the heart of it in No Treason,
“In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man takes the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing.”
Just to be clear I’m not saying democracy is the worst. There are more evil forms of government. Certainly the comparative increase in freedom that democracy so graciously allows has led to improvements in the general state of humanity. But it’s regarded so highly that I think people forget to ask if there’s something better out there. Democracy emerged out of harsher more authoritarian government systems. It was the dangerous and novel idea that people, given the freedom, have the right to decide the rulers for themselves instead of kings and emperors deciding for them. Well I think that it was a good step in the right direction and it should go farther. People don't need rulers at all. We can rule ourselves without government. If you don’t agree at least it’s good to be aware of the pitfalls of the ideology you subscribe to.
