Democracy: The God that Failed – a review

by Adam Haman

I first became aware of Hans-Hermann Hoppe at a liberty-oriented speaking event in Phoenix in the early 2000s. There were speakers there I already knew: Tom Woods, Jacob Hornberger, a few others, but I didn’t know this odd German fellow.

Hoppe stole the show. He absolutely knocked my socks off. Almost 20 years later, his speech is the only one I can recall from that event (which was a great event!). He was speaking about his 2001 book, Democracy: The God that Failed.

In his very thick German accent, this erudite, bespectacled author and professor was advancing a topic that seemed preposterous to my small-government loving heart. He was saying that however bad monarchy was for the freedom and prosperity of the average citizen of a polity, democracy was worse, much worse. And he could prove it.

I was flabbergasted. What was this goofy, difficult to understand, European, defender of kings and kingdoms doing here, at liberty conference?!

And then, in just a few minutes, he made his case and totally convinced me.

It’s not that Hoppe loves monarchies. It’s that, all else equal, democracy is demonstrably worse. If government leaders have the authority (power) to tax their citizens and boss them around in order to “feather their nest” – surely a true statement of all governments that have ever existed – then it’s much better to have a king then a series of temporary “caretakers” of government.

Why? Because both a monarch and a president could have the character flaws to be tyrannical and exploitative, but a monarch, essentially “owns” the country, while a president merely has “temporary management” status.

That means that as terrible as a monarch may be, at least he is incentivized to maximize the “value” of his property over the course of his life – and beyond, if he has heirs. His time horizon is longer than a temporary “manager”.

A monarch may want to tax the citizenry into oblivion and destroy their productive power, but if he does this, his “asset” (the country) is devalued. This is bad for him. The incentives a monarch faces will cause him to not steal and kill and demoralize the populace as much as he might wish. And incentives matter.

Now consider the incentives facing a short-term manager. A president or prime minister is incentivized to steal as much as he possibly can in his limited time in power. It’s best to make hay while the sun shines, after all.

A president has no “ownership” claim on the country after their term. They revert to being a normal citizen. Why preserve the “capital value” of an asset you no longer own? Patriotism? Maybe, but this is a far weaker reed than self-interest.

The argument is air-tight. And Hoppe is just getting started. Democracy: The God that Failed is an absolute powerhouse of a book, and it demolishes, from several different angles, the wretched fairy-tale of democracy.

Of course, Hoppe isn’t saying he wishes mankind to return to monarchies. He’s simply making the point that we haven’t arrived at the optimal political framework with democracy or democratic republics. Far from it.

Hoppe argues for something he calls “the natural order” (see why we like this book?), a system free of both taxation and coercive monopoly in human institutions. Jurisdictions are formed and social contracts (real ones, not the fake Rawlsian kind) are entered into freely.

This system has many names: voluntaryism, private property anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, ordered anarchy, private law capitalism, pure capitalism, and many more. All these terms are describing the same concept: a kind of freedom based on property rights and free association. 

Hoppe is arguing for a system of order that is decentralized, bottom-up, robust, and based on free people and free association. Private property (and the principle that theft of any kind is not allowed) is at the heart of such a system.

Such a system is, I believe, what mankind’s future must be if we are to survive. If we follow it, we will thrive.

It’s beautiful.

I hope you read this book. It shattered paradigms for me that my young mind thought were sacrosanct. The result was a liberating wisdom. Come join me!

Naturally,
Adam Haman