Majority rule ensures that collective choice trumps individual choice
by Anthony de Jasay*
For the last
twenty years or so, the European economy looked tired, sluggish, beset by
chronic unemployment while straining such muscle as it had to spread the
"social" safety net ever wider, ever higher. At the same time, the
American economy showed vigorous growth, resilience and innate energy. Europe
was by and large social democrat, America unrepentantly capitalist. Opinions
were deeply divided about the merits of each, mostly because they sprang from
the ineradicable gut feelings of each side. Lately, however, the clean cut
between the two systems has become more and more blurred. America has acquired
a hugely expensive public health care system, an interventionist monetary
policy to make Keynes blush, an inexorably rising deficit that made the
Director of the Budget throw down his job in despair, a solid complicity
between the labour unions, the tort lawyers and the administration, and an
economy that seems unable to respond to doping and is crawling along as
sluggishly as the European one. Perhaps a little too soon, some observers are
now saying that the US have "Europeanised" themselves; both continents
have become democratic in the same sense.
Valuation and Description
Any language worth
the name makes a clear enough separation between words that evaluate and words
that simply describe. Consider pairs of words that perform the former job and
pairs that do the latter. In the first set, you find such pairs of opposites as
"good-bad", "handsome-ugly", "nice-nasty",
"right-wrong", "true-false" and "just-unjust". In
each pair, the first word is indisputably, self-evidently superior and
preferable to the second. It simple makes no sense to say that bad is better
than good that nasty more agreeable than nice nor that false is worthy of more
respect than true. In the second set of words, you find such pairs as
"like-unlike", "great-small", "many-few",
"long-short", "many-few", "equal-unequal". The
first word in each pair is no more valuable, desirable or commendable than the
second. They both describe; any ranking we give them comes from some particular
context in which "long" is preferable to "short" or vice
versa. "Equal-unequal" is such a pair of words, though you would
not believe it from listening to everyday political rhetoric. So is
"democratic-undemocratic".
The Maximin Rule
Winston Churchill
is supposed to have said that democracy is the worst political system except
for all the others.1 This is a
good enough aphorism, but it is rather poor decision theory. It is hardly an
ideal of rationality to adopt it as a rule.
There is a great
multitude of possible political systems from theocracy to technocracy,
feudalism to plutocracy, hereditary monarchy to populist mob rule, dictatorship
of the few to democracy. Each system is capable of producing a range of good
and bad outcomes, with probabilities we can only guess. It is no use saying
that we refuse to guess at such uncertain outcomes; for whether we have guessed
or not, or guessed right or not, the outcomes arrive just the same, and it is
better to at least try and anticipate them even if we cannot be confident to
guess right, than give up hope and not try at all. Perhaps needless to say, the
outcomes a given political system produces depend not only on the system
itself, but on the kind of people and the kind of historical conjuncture to
which it is applied.
By opting for a
political system, we opt for what game theorists would call a
"strategy" in a game we play "against" destiny. Each
strategy is geared to produce one out of a range of outcomes from very good to
very bad. Rationality, understood as being true to one's likes and dislikes,
requires us to opt for the strategy that offers the best combination of
outcomes weighted by their probabilities.
One famous
strategy, maximin, deviates from this rule of rationality. It is not the one
that offers the best combination of good or bad, (where "best"
combination is by definition better liked than any other), but the one whose
worst possible outcome is better than the worst possible outcome of any other
available strategy. Its name, maximin, means "maximising the minimum",
and that leads you to the strategy whose worst outcome is the best among the
worst outcomes of all the others, and never mind any of the universe of
outcomes that are better than that. Democracy locks us safely into maximin. It
is truly the best of the worst.
Freehold or
Leasehold
"Democratic"
is not a word of approval nor is "undemocratic" a word of
condemnation. Like "equal" and "unequal", such words are
descriptive and anyone who uses them as evaluative ones is a victim of the
linguistic trap laid by politicians, media people and second-rate academics
over the last half-century or so. It is an error, too, to conflate democracy
with the rule of law. Prussia under Frederic the Great, France under
Louis XV and Austria-Hungary under Francis Joseph were undemocratic and adhered
to the rule of law.
All tenure of
political power except democracy is like freehold property that perdures until
some exogenous factor terminates it. Tenure of power under democracy is like
leasehold property; it has a built-in expiration date at which it is terminated
and needs to be renewed. Getting a fresh leasehold is a matter of competition.
The lease is awarded by majority vote to the competitor who offers the highest
price to a potential coalition for its support. The price must then be paid by
society as a whole, but principally by the potential minority. The result is a
net redistribution from the better-off to the worse-off, for rich-to-poor
transfer can always outbid poor-to-rich one. The basic mechanics of political
competition for a lease on power ensure that on balance democracy is
intrinsically egalitarian. Egalitarian ideology is a consequence of this
mechanism and not its cause.
On the road to
equality of income and wealth, a terminus that is never reached and is not even
seriously striven for, governments must outdo themselves at embellishing and
nourishing a welfare state. Friedrich Hayek, of all people,
positively commends the further expansion of the state to this end: "the
only question which arises is whether the benefits are worth the cost."2 A very good
question indeed. "Government may render... many services which involve no
coercion except for the raising of the means by taxation"3. Government is
induced by competitive pressure to pre-empt a growing share of the national
product for its own expenditure, leaving a shrinking proportion for individual
disposition. Short of revolt, individuals must submit to this, for majority
rule ensures that collective choice trumps individual choice. The process of
adopting new good ideas for "useful public goods and services"
"whose benefit exceeds their cost" reaches a frenzy as the regular
expiration date of the leasehold on power approaches. One has the impression
that election fever begins ever earlier and election campaigns are becoming
ever more massive and all-encompassing as democracy matures.
The maximin-type
safety of the democratic system provided by the government having to face the
expiration of its tenure at regular intervals is paid for with a heavy price.
Capital accumulation and investment tend to be lower, structural adaptation
meets more resistance and budget deficits are more chronic in democracy than in
some, though of course not all, non-democratic systems. One need not select
such extreme examples as France or Spain compared to Korea, Singapore or
Indonesia to perceive the general tendency. Democracy has produced a
"social model" in Europe, and is busily at work to produce one in the
United States, whose attractions are visible enough, but whose costs are
concealed or too easily imputed to causes other than democracy itself.
What all this
suggests is not that we should somehow get rid of democracy and put in its
place the miraculous "new order" stuffed with empty phrases and
little else. Rather, what it suggests is that democracy does not deserve the
awestruck adulation and praise, due only to some ultimate good, that it is
receiving. It deserves constant critical scrutiny and resistance to its
encroaching creep at the margin; the very same treatment that should be meted
out to any and every other kind of political system.
Footnotes
1."Many forms of Government have been tried and
will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is
perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form
of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to
time." Speech in the House of Commons, The Official Report, House
of Commons (5th Series), 11 November 1947, vol. 444, pp. 206-07.
2.F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty,
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1960), p. 222.
3.F.A. Hayek, New Studies In Philosophy,
Politics, Economics and The History of Ideas, (London, Routledge, 1978)
* Anthony de Jasay is an
Anglo-Hungarian economist living in France. He is the author, a.o., of The State (Oxford,
1985), Social Contract, Free Ride (Oxford 1989) and Against
Politics (London,1997). His latest book, Justice and Its
Surroundings, was published by Liberty Fund in the summer of 2002.
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