(Meme by Matt Zwolinski)

I know Salon only employs fools and knaves, but I did not expect to see them publish something as silly as this:

Rand Paul’s brand of libertarian believes that “liberty” is freedom from an oppressive government.* But in a democracy the government is us.

Christ, it’s one thing if they strawman libertarians every chance they get. But apparently the writers at Salon don’t even read political theory in their own intellectual tradition. Most left-wing, progressive, pro-democracy philosophers wouldn’t be willing to say something as silly as the quotation above. John Stuart Mill, who is often seen as beginning the move away from classical liberalism toward modern liberalism, and who helped to popularize the phrase “tyranny of the majority,” wrote:

This view of things, recommending itself equally to the intelligence of thinkers and to the inclination of those important classes in European society to whose real or supposed interests democracy is adverse, has had no difficulty in establishing itself; and in political speculations “the tyranny of the majority” is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. (On Liberty)

Note what the Salon author is not saying. The author doesn’t say that empirically, it turns out democracy tend to oppress their citizens less than non-democracies. After all, that wouldn’t do the author much good. The claim that democracies are relatively good at avoiding oppression is compatible with the claim that they still oppress people too much.

The author goes on to complain about how what we should really worry about are corporations having too much power. Okay, I’m worried. But what’s the major mechanism by which corporations acquire power? In fact, representative government, especially representative government with a wide scope of control over the economy, encourages and facilitates economic rent seeking. The mechanism behind this is well understood. That’s why I have to keep pointing out to the Left that corporatism is largely their fault.

But beyond that, the author’s fundamental argument is unsound. Yes, in an important sense, the government is us. In a democracy, fundamental political power is shared equally by all members of the public. But it doesn’t follow that we as individuals have any significant control or autonomy over democratic government, nor does it follow that because “we are the government,” the government cannot oppress us. Quite the contrary.

Here, in response, I quote from a draft of my forthcoming book Markets without Limits, which I’m co-authoring with Peter Jaworski:

Benjamin Barber says, “We want what we want privately, but we want even more to be able to choose the agenda that determines what our private choices will be.” It’s possible he’s right about that, though we don’t know, since Barber didn’t conduct or cite any surveys or research verifying that this is in fact what people want. Regardless, Barber asserts that commodification disempowers us. Reducing the scope of the public sphere, and reducing the degree to which we engage in that sphere, in turn reduces our autonomy, or so he claims.

In contrast, we will argue, there’s little reason to think that for most citizens political involvement gives them any real autonomy, any autonomy worth having. Market autonomy may also be limited in some ways, but it’s real autonomy, while political autonomy is a crummy substitute.

There is a sure-fire test to determine that you do not have autonomous control over a situation: no matter what you choose or how you decide, the same thing happens anyway. Your decisions make no difference. To illustrate, while writing this paragraph, we conducted an experiment. We decided that the sun would set in the east rather than the west today. We also decided that the moon would appear purple rather than its usual yellow. Alas, our decision had no effect. We repeated this experiment multiple times, again with no effect. We concluded that we lacked autonomous control over the sun and moon.

So it goes with politics. Except in very special circumstances—such as if you manage to secure high office or other positions of influence and power—your decisions make no difference to political outcomes. Regardless of whether you choose to vote or not, regardless of how you vote, and regardless of whatever picketing, letter writing, protesting, and activism you personally engage in, the same results will occur. Even when things go your way, it’s usually not because you personally contributed to that outcome, but simply because enough other likeminded people made their contribution. A good metaphor here is that the democratic majority is like a large wave crashing toward the shore. You can swim with it or against it. In doing so, you might slightly modify the wave, causing a few molecules of water to hit the sand slightly sooner or later. But, either way, the wave is crashing, and you don’t make a substantial difference. If you had spent your entire life disengaged with politics, or spent it voting and promoting the opposite of what you in fact supported, the results would have been entirely the same. You might as well try to change where the sun sets or what color the moon is.

In contrast, in the market, we have real autonomy. We get a wide range of options, and our decisions make a real difference in how things turn out. So, for instance, we make a range of decisions about what clothes to wear, what cars to drive, where to live, what to eat, what to read, etc., and our decisions actually make a difference. We decide to eat cake, and, lo!, we eat cake. We decide to wear buy khakis, and, lo!, we wear khakis.

Now, clearly there are limits to market autonomy. What one can decide depends upon whether there are willing trading partners, where one lives, and how much money one has. Some people have much more market autonomy than others. However, even the homeless people begging on the streets of Washington DC or the desperate poor of Haiti have enormously more autonomy as market actors than we the authors do as political actors.

Suppose these decisions—what to eat, read, wear, etc.—where taken from us and given over to politics. Suppose these decisions were made collectively, let’s say, on Barber’s behalf, after sustained and reasoned deliberation and debate. We would thereby suffer a severe loss of autonomy. The collective would have power over each of us, and each of us, though equal members of that collective, would effectively be powerless.

Barber says that people want to choose the agenda that determines what our private choices will be. Even if he’s right, democracy doesn’t deliver the ability to make these choices. The whole point of democracy is to render individuals powerless and instead to deliver this power to a collective.

What about the idea that democracy protects us from being dominated? Quoting from my paper “Political Liberty: Who Needs It?”:

In the end, it’s just not true that I need the political liberties to prevent others from dominating and exploiting me.  What prevents me from being dominated is other citizens’ restraint.  If they decide to act badly, my rights to vote or run for office can’t stop them.  The moral majority stops the unjust minority, the courts stop them, or they stop themselves.  Yet if tomorrow my country decides to dominate me, my political liberties provide me no more protection than a bucket provides against a flood.

I’ll add to this a summary of Nozick’s “Tale of the Slave,” taken from the same paper:

Nozick describes the changing conditions under which a slave lives and asks his readers to point out when the slave stops being a slave.  Here’s how the story goes.  Let’s say you are the slave.  At first, you live under a cruel master, who beats you arbitrarily.  Then the master posts a set of rules and only punishes you when you violate the rules.  The master then starts allocating resources among all of his slaves on kindly grounds, considering their needs, merit, etc.  The master then decides to allow the slaves to spend 4 days doing whatever they please and only requires them to work 3 days on his manor.  The master then decides to allow the slaves to live in the city or wherever else they like, provided they send the master 3/7ths of their income.  The master also continues to regulate many of their activities and can call them back to the manor for defense.  The master decides to allow his 10,000 slaves—other than you—to make decisions among themselves about how to regulate their behavior and how much of their income they must send the master.  You are bound by their decision, but cannot vote or deliberate.

When the master dies, he leaves all of his slaves, including you, to each other as a collective body, except for you.  That is, his 10,000 other slaves collectively own everyone, including you, but you own no one.  The other 10,000 slaves decide to allow you to advise them about what rules they should pass.  These rules govern both their behavior and yours.  Eventually, as a reward for your service, they allow you to vote whenever they are evenly divided—5000 to 5000—over what to do.  You cast a ballot in an envelope, which they agree to open whenever they are split.  Finally, since they’ve never been evenly split, they just include your vote with theirs all the time.

At the end of the story, many readers think the slave never stopped being a slave.  This is disturbing because by the end of the story, the situation very much resembles modern democracy.  One thing we should learn from Nozick’s story is that being a member of rule-making body, especially a large one, does not give one much control.  Each slave in the tale of the slave can legitimately claim that everyone else makes all the decisions and that the decisions the body makes would have occurred without her input.  Even when democratic outcomes result from the equal input of all, there can be feeling of an utter lack of power.  Our voices and votes are lost.