If the continuing incompetence of Congress over passing a budget and reopening the U.S. government doesn’t show the absurdity of unlimited representative republicanism, what could do so? Whether or not to extend COVID-era special subsidies for medical insurance appears to be the main issue, but other issues are undoubtedly involved. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. That’s politics.
The problem is that the government has its hands in everything. That means a constituency exists for each thing the government does. If you want to upset and mobilize a group of people, call for an end to some privilege or restriction, which must come at the expense of the freedom and wealth of everyone but the favored beneficiaries. That’s how “democratic” government works, after all. This sets off a mad quest for favor, which some contenders will be more capable of securing than others. Don’t fall for the canard that the bureaucrats and politicians rationally produce useful things. If something looks, quacks, and waddles like a canard, you can be sure it’s a canard. “Who rules” is a secondary question. The first should be: what are the rules?
Rejecting democracy—representative republicanism, more precisely—does not entail accepting authoritarianism in any form. Quite the contrary. It entails full acceptance of the protection of individual liberty and property rights—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as Thomas Jefferson, inspired by John Locke, put it in the Declaration of Independence. If we cannot have market-ordered, individualist, anarchism, then at least let’s keep the government strictly limited to barring physical force. If it ventures beyond that boundary, it sets off a civil war over the people’s private wealth and liberty. If you seek the consequences, look around. They are blindingly evident.
As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations:
All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions.
But isn’t pervasive government necessary to engineer a decent society? No, it is not. Thomas Paine, no anarchist he, understood this. As he wrote in The Rights of Man:
Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together.
