Honorable mention goes to Robert Higgs for “Democracy and Faits Accomplis” :Tocqueville described the situation [of France in 1848]: "The truth — the deplorable truth — is that a taste for holding office and a desire to live on the public money is not with us a disease restricted to either party, but the great, chronic ailment of the whole nation; the result of the democratic constitution of our society and of the excessive centralization of our Government; the secret malady which undermined all former governments, and which will undermine all governments to come."
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In 1850, which was to be Bastiat's last year, he wrote two of his most famous works — The Law and "What is Seen and What is Not Seen." His message in The Law is well-known and universally neglected: The law as it exists is a perversion of justice. "It has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and lawful defense into a crime, that it may punish it." When the law is thus perverted it gives "to politics, properly so called, an exaggerated preponderance." The plundered classes tend to enter politics to take part in lawmaking. Depending on their degree of enlightenment, he says, they may either "wish to put an end to lawful plunder, or they may desire to take part in it."
He says repeatedly that law is justice, and justice he defines as the absence of injustice. The [true] law and its "necessary agent," force, impose nothing on a man "but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all."
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As he discusses in the introductory section, "To the Youth of France," Bastiat's message in the Harmonies is not that the unhampered market is a well-oiled machine free of strife and error. He does not say that people will always get along, but "that there is a natural harmony among men's interests," and personal liberty is necessary to realize this harmony. Nor does he deny that "poverty, injustice, and oppression … desolate the human race." The question to ask is "whether or not we have liberty." We need to ask if liberty is being allowed to act "with full force, or whether [its] action is not profoundly disrupted by the contrary action of institutions of human origin."
"It is not enough, then, to set forth the natural laws of the social order in all their majestic harmony; it is also necessary to show the disturbing factors that nullify their action."
Because "electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by refusing to reelect them or the parliamentary majorities that support them," the distinct possibility — nay, the great likelihood — exists that the voters will find themselves time after time concerned about a horse that has already fled the barn, never to be retrieved.
This bleak view of the political process under representative democracy becomes even bleaker once we recognize that office seekers typically either speak in vague, emotion-laden generalities or simply lie about their intentions. After taking office, they may act in complete disregard of their campaign promises, trusting that when they run for reelection, they will be able to concoct a plausible excuse for their infidelity and betrayal of trust. Thus, the voters remain permanently immersed in a fog of disinformation, emotional manipulation, and bald-faced mendacity. No matter what a candidate promises, the voters have no means of holding him to those promises or of punishing his misbehavior until it may be too late to matter. In many cases, unfortunately, the officeholders' decisions give rise to irreversible consequences — outcomes that cannot possibly be undone ex post.
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People in power have the greatest ability to gerrymander the voting districts, bias the electoral rules, buy votes with taxpayers' money, stuff the ballot boxes, and otherwise ensure that those in power — regardless of how they got there — remain in power. Similarly, people in power have the greatest ability to appoint new judges, alter judicial jurisdictions, and change the size or number of courts of appeal to ensure that those in power — regardless of how they got there — gain judicial vindication of their (heretofore unconstitutional) actions.
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If the people never avail themselves of the opportunity to overturn what was done initially without their consent, they may thereby reveal only that people who have been fed thin gruel for a long time get used to eating it and even come to consider it nutritious. In less metaphorical terms, my claim is that ideological change is often path-dependent: where a dominant ideology stands and where it is most likely to go in the future depend significantly on where it has been in the past.
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Worse, owing to "ideological learning," many people who initially had not desired these changes did approve of them in the circumstances in which they later found themselves — circumstances that they had in no way chosen, not even indirectly, but into which they had been forcibly shoved by the ruling decision-makers. Contemplating this situation, one readily recalls Goethe's dictum that "none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
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