Chapter 13, “The State and Antisocial Conduct,” here:

mises.org/liberal/ch1sec13.asp.

75 Ibid.

GOLD, THE GOLDEN RULE, AND GOVERNMENT21

is “the march of God in the world”76 becomes an absolute truth, never mind that truth per se has no meaning and that the world is once again absurd.

To escape this travesty of reason, then, we must show that however inevitable it might be, evil can never be necessary, which we can only do by defining what evil is. And we do so by (1) acknowledging the primordial fact that being is, (2) intuiting from it the primordial value that being is good, and (3) acting on the resultant impulse that more being is better.For from these it follows that (1) less being is bad, (2) nonbeing is worst of all, and (3) evil therefore consists of that which fosters one or both.

Understood in this way, it is clear that evil has no existence apart from being and the goodness thereof—i.e., it has no metaphysical reality of its own—and is instead derivative of them. Thus did Augustine of Hippo, for example, argue against … the Manichean conception of evil as an independent reality andpower coeternal with good by his analysis of evil … as the privation,corruption, or perversion of something good. Evil, he taught, has noindependent existence, but is always parasitic upon good, whichalone has substantial being.77

While its apologists would have us believe that the state exists solely to serve society, we know, on the contrary, that because the state has no power beyond what it is able to extract from society, its existence is entirely dependent upon the good(s) that society is able to produce. And as such dependency is the very definition of parasitism, we confront the state the same way we would any parasite—i.e., as that which preserves itself at the expense of its host.

It follows, then, that while the state is indeed “an evil inflicted by men on men,” the preservation of society in no way “justifies the action of the organs of the state.” Instead, it justifies whatever action society deems necessary to lessen the evil if not eradicate it altogether. And as this includes the evil that manifests itself in the so-called democratic state, it is to this most insidious form of evil that we now turn.

76 See G. F. W. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 1820, online English translation here:www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prstate.htm#PR257; extended quotation as follows: “The march of God in the world, that is what the state is. The basis of the state is the power of reason actualizing itself as will. In considering the Idea of the state, we must not have our eyes on particular states or on particular institutions. Instead we must consider the Idea, this actual God, by itself.”

77The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press,New York, 1967, Vol. 3, pp. 136 and 137.

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9. Democracy and Its Contradictions

The God That Failed —Hans-Hermann Hoppe78

Democracy, as Churchill said, “is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,”79 the assumption being that because the state is necessary, the democratic state is the best state, even if it is merely the best among bad ones. This flies in the face, of course, of the godlike esteem in which democracy is held around the world, both by those who are citizens of democratic states and by those who yearn to be. Democracy, after all, is based on the right of self-determination—i.e., “the proposition that the legitimacy of all political power arises from, and only from, the consent of the governed, the people”80—and so, then, must any state founded on this proposition.

The problem, however, is that self-determination and democracy are mutually exclusive propositions. After all, the people’s consent is supposedly expressed through the ballot box—i.e., through the right to vote—yet what, in truth, does this have to do with self-determination?

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressivegovernment in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if theycould see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But itwould not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the governmentitself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up,or even consented to.81

In other words, what does it mean to vote within the confines of that which one had no say in creating and when those confines, therefore, cannot legitimately—i.e., in a morally justified manner—rule over one? Even assuming that those confines are minimal, as is arguably the case with the United States Constitution as written, what real authority or obligation can such a document have? The answer, simply put, is none: The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has noauthority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man andman. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract

78Democracy: The God That Failed, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NewJersey, 2001; see book description here: www.mises.org/store/Democracy-The-God—That-Failed-P240.aspx79 Speech to the House of Commons, November 11, 1947; expanded quotation here.

80 Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order & Freedom, ICS

Press, 1990 (Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 220.

81 Lysander Spooner, No Treason, No. VI, The Constitution of No Authority, 1870; onlineversion here: www.lysanderspooner.org/bib_new.htm.

GOLD, THE GOLDEN RULE, AND GOVERNMENT23

between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only acontract between persons living [long] ago. … Furthermore, weknow, historically, that only a small portion even of the people thenexisting were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted toexpress either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Thosepersons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all deadnow. … And the constitution, so far as it was their contract, diedwith them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatoryupon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature ofthings, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not evenattempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does notpurport to be an agreement between any body but “the people” thenexisting; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right,power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody butthemselves.82

Moreover,

As taxation is made compulsory on all, whether they vote or not, alarge proportion of those who vote, no doubt do so to prevent theirown money being used against themselves; when, in fact, they wouldhave gladly abstained from voting, if they could thereby have savedthemselves from taxation alone, to say nothing of being saved fromall the other usurpations and tyrannies of the government. To take aman’s property without his consent, and then to infer his consentbecause he attempts, by voting, to prevent that property from beingused to his injury, is a very insufficient proof of his consent tosupport the Constitution. It is, in fact, no proof at all. And as we canhave no legal knowledge as to who the particular individuals are, ifthere are any, who are willing to be taxed for the sake of voting, wecan have no legal knowledge that any particular individual consentsto be taxed for the sake of voting; or, consequently, consents tosupport the Constitution.

Just as representative democracy is a sham, then, so is the constitutionalism that attends it. For the latter is based not on self-determination but on pre-determination, which, under the best of circumstances, merely provides the means by which such consent as may be presumed to have been given by one generation can accordingly be withdrawn by a subsequent one. And the best can hardly be said to prevail. For while the most famous political document ever written, the Declaration of Independence, clearly affirms the absolute right of self-determination—i.e., of secession—the constitution that followed it makes no mention of this right, nor does the nation founded on the basis of it recognize its validity. On

82 Ibid.

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the contrary, the U.S. government has made it clear that it will pursue secessionists to the point of genocide on the presumption that they are ipso facto traitors. A “Civil War” was fought on this very point, after all, at a cost of some 630,000 lives and an untold destruction of property, at the conclusion of which the U.S. government was forced to abandon the trial of the secessionists’ leader, realizing that to do so would be to expose the fallacy of its argument: “The federal government knew that it could not try [Confederate President Jefferson] Davis for treason without raising the constitutional issue of secession.”83

Nonetheless, nearly a century and a half later, the U.S. government staunchly maintains its position (without openly defending it) and does so with full knowledge that its erstwhile adversary, the former Soviet Union, and its present one, China, each cited the Civil War as their authority for using force to keep their own states intact: Perhaps the most dangerous legacy of the war was the Northernclaim that it could use force and go to war to prevent any state fromwithdrawing from the Union. This has haunted us in the pastdecade and will continue to do so, as the Soviet Union’s MikhailGorbachev claimed the right to use force to hold his union togetherand cited Abraham Lincoln as good authority for doing so. In 1999,the Chinese premier reminded President Clinton that he had theright to use force to hold China together, to go to war to reclaimTaiwan, and he too cited Abraham Lincoln as good authority.84

But such is the logic of the state that it seeks to perpetuate itself at any and all cost, and thus does the state labeled “democratic” fall victim to its own hypocrisy. For any state that denies its citizens the absolute right of self-determination is totalitarian, the more so in accordance with how far it will go to deny that right. And while 630,000 lives are but a small fraction of the those lost in the great lie that was Stalinist Russia,85 insofar as Lincolnian America fell victim to a lie of its own,86 the lies differ only in degree, not in

83 Charles Adams, When In the Course of Human Events, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000,