Wednesday, May 15, 2019

QUORA: ‘Can democracy survive capitalism?’



I posted this answer:

The real question is, Can capitalism survive democracy?

Capitalism as an organized political/economic system is a free society based on Enlightenment political principles. Those principles include individual rights, including property rights; limited rights-protecting government; free markets; and governance of objective law applied equally to all. In its original philosophic conception, America is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic that has a democratic process. In a republic, the power of the vote is checked by the constitutional limits on government power. The basic feature of capitalism, which is integral to Americanism, is individual autonomy and self-governance, within the confines established by the same rights of others. Consequently, the individual needs the freedom of action, as defined by the principle of individual rights, to live by the judgement of his own mind without coercive interference from others, including others as government officials. For capitalism to function, one’s rights should never be at risk in any election.

Democracy is unlimited rule by electoral majority (or its elected representatives). The basic premise of democracy is that the elected government can do whatever it chooses to do to whomever it chooses based solely on the premise that it represents the “will of the people” as expressed by victorious factions in elections. There are no constitutional limits to government power except as determined by government officials, and thus no way to protect individual rights. When majority rule is the standard, there are no limiting principles to that rule. Democracy is the rule of mob might, not objective law. “Freedom” is basically government permission, and individual “rights” can be restricted or discarded any time the government can claim it is acting on the “will of the people: that is, there are no inalienable rights-which means, no rights at all. Democracy, properly understood, is a manifestation of totalitarian collectivism.

Do not confuse democracy with the democratic process in a constitutional republic. If by “democracy” we mean the limited electoral authority in a constitutional republic, there is no conflict between capitalism and democracy, since the freedom of the individual is not at risk. However, capitalism is incompatible with genuine democracy, which places no constraints on the government’s force over individuals. In any conflict between force and voluntarism, force will win--which means, in any conflict between democracy and capitalism, democracy wins, making capitalism nonfunctional.

Freedom is not the right to vote. Freedom is the right to live your life regardless of anyone else’s vote, so long as you respect the same rights of others. In the proper understanding of the terms, democracy can exist without capitalism, but not the other way around. Capitalism, the system of inalienable individual liberty, cannot survive genuine democracy, the system of majority rule.

Recommended for further study: on democracy and freedom, see Timothy Sandefur, The Conscience of the Constitution, especially Chapter One, “Democracy and Freedom”; on capitalism and freedom, see Andrew Bernstein, Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights; and on the connection between rights and politics, see Tara Smith, “Moral Rights and Political Freedom
.”

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* [Quora is a social media website founded by two former Facebook employees. According to Wikipedia:

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[3]Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[4]

You can also reply to other users’ answers.]

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