Democracy is the Road to Surfdom

[Libertas Aut Mortis]

I am going to paste a few quotes to get the mental juices flowing so we can be on the same level for an intelligent discussion.



Herman Hans Hoppe:

Democracy: The God That Failed
www.riosmauricio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Hoppe_Democracy_The_God_That_Failed.pdf
From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy
https://mises.org/library/aristocracy-monarchy-democracy


https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/david-gordon/the-states-greatest-tricke280a8-exposed/

Here it is necessary to avert a misunderstanding. Hoppe is not a defender of absolute monarchy — far from it. He argues only that democracy as it is today understood is worse than monarchy. But, as is never to be forgotten, monarchy ranks far below the best system, one of private property rights in which respected members of the elite settle disputes.

The following studies are written from the vantage point of modern Austrian social theory. Throughout, the influence of Ludwig von Mises and even more of Murray N. Rothbard is noticeable. The elementary theorems of political economy and philosophy, which are employed here for the purpose of reconstructing history and proposing a constructive alternative to democracy, have found their most detailed treatment in Mises' and Rothbard's principle theoretical works.15 As well, many of the subjects discussed in the following have also been dealt with in their many applied works. Furthermore, the following studies share with Mises and especially Rothbard a fundamental and robust anti-statist and pro-private property and free enterprise position.


This notwithstanding, the following studies can in two regards claim originality. On the one hand, they provide for a more profound understanding of modern political history. In their applied works, Mises and Rothbard discussed most of the twentieth century's central economic and political issues and events: socialism vs. capitalism, monopoly vs. competition, private vs. public property, production and trade vs. taxation, regulation, and redistribution, etc.; and both gave detailed accounts of the rapid growth of state power during the 20th century and explained its economically and morally deleterious consequences. However, while they have proven exceptionally perceptive and farsighted in these endeavors (especially in comparison to their empiricist-positivist counterparts), neither Mises nor Rothbard made a systematic attempt to search for a cause of the decline of classical liberal thought and laissez-faire capitalism and the concomitant rise of anti-capitalist political ideologies and statism during the 20th century. Certainly, they did not think of democracy as being such a cause. In fact, although aware of the economic and ethical deficiencies of democracy, both Mises and Rothbard had a soft spot for democracy and tended to view the transition from monarchy to democracy as progress. In contrast, I will explain the rapid growth of state power in the course of the 20th century lamented by Mises and Rothbard as the systematic outcome of democracy and the democratic mindset, i.e., the (erroneous) belief in the efficiency and/or justice of public property and popular (majority) rule.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn


“Liberty or Equality”

https://mises.org/library/liberty-or-equality-challenge-our-time


“Credo of a Reactionary”
Part 1

http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1943jul-00086

Part 2
http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmMercury-1943jul-00088


“American Liberalism Explained”

www.mmisi.org/ir/33_01/leddihn.pdf

Sometime in the 18th century, the word equality gained ground as a political ideal, but the idea was always vague. In this treatise, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that it reduced to one simple and very dangerous idea: equality of political power as embodied in democracy.
He marshals the strongest possible case that democratic equality is the very basis not of liberty, as is commonly believed, but the total state. He uses national socialism as his prime example. He further argues the old notion of government by law is upheld in old monarchies, restrained by a noble elite. Aristocracy, not democracy, gave us liberty. On his side in this argument, he includes the whole of the old liberal tradition, and offers overwhelming evidence for his case. In our times, war and totalitarianism do indeed sail under the democratic flag.
This book, capable of overturning most of what you thought you knew about political systems, was first published in 1952.

As a reactionary, I believe in liberty, but not in equality. The only equality I can accept is the spiritual equality of two newborn babes regardless of the color, creed or race of their parents. I accept neither the degrading egalitarianism of the "democrats," nor the artificial divisions of the racialists, nor the class distinctions of communists and snobs.

The disaster was final when the French Revolution, faced by the eternal dilemma of choosing between liberty and equality, decided for equality. The guillotine and the Strasbourg magistrates who creed that the spire of the cathedral be demolished because it rose above the egalitarian level of all other houses, are everlasting symbols of modernism and perverse "progress."

I dread all masses consisting of men afraid to be unique, to file persons; caring for safety more than for liberty, fearing their neighbors or “community" more than God and their conscience. These are the people who demand not only equality but identity. They suspect anybody who dares to be different. They want merely "ordinary, decent chaps" after the British, "regular guys" after the American or "rechte Kerle" after the German pattern. Modern Man seems to have only one wish: to see everything molded after his own image; he loathes personality and wants to assimilate. What he cannot assimilate he weeds out. Our whole age is marked by a vast system of leveling and assimilating agencies comprising schools, ads, barracks, mass-produced goods, mass-produced newspapers and books and ideas. The darker side of this process can be seen in the social ostracism practiced against minorities in pseudo-liberal democracies; in the human abattoirs and concentration camps of the super-democratic totalitarian nations; in the endless stream of homeless refugees wandering aimlessly all over the world. Common Man in any aggregations is pitiless, wholly lacking in generosity.

Liberty, after all, is an aristocratic ideal

We reactionaries (whether we know it or not) are all Whigs. Our tradition, in English speaking countries, rests on Magna Charta, which only the ignorant will call "democratic. “I have no relish for nineteenth century "liberalism" with its gross materialism and the pagan belief in the "survival f the fittest," i.e. the most unscrupulous. For European conditions I am naturally a monarchist because monarchy is basically supra-racial and supra-national.
Not only did free institutions survive better in the monarchies of Northwestern Europe than in the republican heart of the continent but in the ethnically mixed area of Central and Eastern Europe one ought to prefer monarchs of foreign origin with alien wives, alien mothers, and alien sons- and daughters-in-law to political "leaders “belonging passionately to specific nationalities, classes, parties. I feel freer under a man who, is nobody’s choice than under the appointee of a majority following blindly their overheated emotions.

Voltaire had more chance to sway the courts of Paris, Potsdam and Petersburg than a Dawson, a Sorokin, a Ferrero or a Bernanos has to sway the "democratic" masses. The European monarchs intellectually and morally have matched their republican top-hatted epigones. The Bourbons certainly compare favorably with the politicos of the three French Republics. The Fuehrers of the totalitarian era have of course often been more “brilliant" and successful because less scrupulous. Backed by carefully staged plebiscites, they feel justified in indulging in slaughters no Bourbon, Habsburg or Hohenzollern would have risked. Plato told us more than two thousand years ago that democracy degenerates inevitably into dictatorships and de Tocqueville re-emphasized it in I835. Most fatheads on both sides of the Atlantic continue to confused democracy with liberalism, two elements which may, or may not, coexist. A "prohibition" backed by 51 per cent of the electorate may be most democratic, but it is hardly liberal.

What we reactionaries want is freedom and diversity

As a reactionary I would like to see materialized in this country more of the anti-democratic ideas of the Founding Fathers.

Indeed, few European writers fulminated more strongly against the demos than Madison, Hamilton, Marshall, John Adams or even Jefferson who stood for an aristocracy of merit, not for mass-rule. Yet Hamilton’s centralism is basically leftish. Neither here nor in Europe should it prevail

Democracy can be liberal or illiberal, but while an absolute monarchy cannot be democratic, it can be liberal. The monarchy of Louis XIV, who allegedly said “I am the State,” was in many ways far more liberal than a number of modern democracies. He could not require an annual income tax or conscript his subjects for military service, nor could he issue a law banning champagne from dinner tables. Conversely, many of the horrors of the French Revolution were democratic (but not liberal).
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a gradual and problematic synthesis of democracy and liberalism took place. Since its beginning, this union suffered from the democratic principle of
equality, the antithesis of liberty. We are either free or equal since equality is “unnatural” and can only be realized by artificial, if not repressive, measures. (Think of a garden hedge. How can an equal height be achieved? Only by constant clipping!) After all, William Dean Howells called “Liberty and Inequality” the two great American ideals, and Charles Beard insisted that the Founding Fathers loathed democracy
more than Original Sin. Furthermore, the word democracy appears neither in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Constitution. Still, the democratic-liberal synthesis created endless confusion in the minds of many people and often caused them to confuse freedom with equality, or equality
with freedom. The confiscation of a periodical, for instance, is often denounced as “undemocratic,” although it is quite possible that the majority of citizens were in favor of its termination. A measure like
this, however, is certainly illiberal.

I wish to foster a discussion about Democracy.

I have found myself firmly agreeing with Karl Marx that “Democracy is the Road to Socialism”. And I must agree also with Hayek that “Socialism is the Road to Serfdom”.

Democracy is the Road to Serfdom.




Lets talk.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Lets talk.

OK.

It's "serfdom".

Serf, being a Middle Age term for slave or vassal.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Lets talk.

OK.

It's "serfdom".

Serf, being a Middle Age term for slave or vassal.

 

[Anti Federalist]

 

[CaptUSA]

Road to Surfdom:

 

[RJB]

OK.

It's "serfdom".

Serf, being a Middle Age term for slave or vassal.

Yeah. I love surfdom.

 

[erowe1]

I rowed to surf dumb.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

I rowed to surf dumb.

Cool story, bro.

 

[Libertas Aut Mortis]

Lol.

I brought that on myself.

 

[Conza88]

http://conza.tumblr.com/tagged/democracy

Enjoy.

 

[presence]

It should be noted that Hoppe's argument that Democracy was worse than Monarchy, which sucked, therefore Anarcho-Capitalism.

 

[otherone]

gnarly topic, brah.

 

[otherone]

....

 

[Libertas Aut Mortis]

It should be noted that Hoppe's argument that Democracy was worse than Monarchy, which sucked, therefore Anarcho-Capitalism.

Absolutely, I wanted to make sure that that was up front and noted. That is why I put that as my first quote.

 

[Ronin Truth]

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." -- Winston Churchill

"Democracy is the road to socialism." -- Karl Marx

"Democracy is indispensable to socialism." -- Vladimir Lenin

"The goal of socialism is communism." -- Vladimir Lenin