[Skybird]

@ Hitman & BilgeRat,

Hoppe'S criticism of democracy is very specific, and I challenge anyone to prove wrong the reasonable principles and the logic in his thinking. That I want to see!

Also, his is no arguing that democracy is hijacked (that can be additionally the case, but it plays no role). He nails down very precisely (and one could say: without mercy) why democracy even in the most ideal incarnation of it must and will fail, and that is not due to a distortion, or a hijacking, but that is due to the very basic principles by which it is running. The very design if flawed from the starting line on, and rewards the worst politics and politicians, while making it almost impossible for those of higher human(e) qualities to come to power and infleunce. Of use it can be only in the smallest of imaginable communal contexts. And we do not even talk of a communal context the size of a city with thousands of people living there - smaller! Beyond that scaling, democracy is a mess, and always must be a mess. Like an orb always is round.

The good name for democracy is a relatively new thing, and for most of history back until the ancient Greek it was despised and warned of - the Greeks deeply struggled to avoid it. Even the founding fathers of the US did not want it, and not before the civil war it was nevertheless enforced - with all the negative consequences from it that had been feared in the centuries before - and that indeed then became all true.

Show the basic reasoning in Hoppe's very precise arguments being wrong. Just saying a common place like "we have nothing better", is not good enough. There is a reason why he is seen as a forthinker who has gone even beyond the great names of modern real libertarianism, Mises and Rothbard. I can see all his points and arguments being perfectly and flawlessly illustrated by the way in which the EU behaves and unfolds, and the US as well. His points are being shown true. They illustrate point by point how right he is.

I recommend to read his main work, "Democracy-The god that never was". Or to pick the many essays and articles that I have linked to here and in other threads over the past 2 or 3 weeks. The book is 14 chapters, each saying in principle the same, but every one concentrating on a slightly different focus and point of interest. So, while it repeats certain basics several times, you nevertheless can easily learn them that way right because they are repeated. The chapters in principle form independent essays that could also be given one by one, each one for itself, well, at leats most of them. That is why it is like this.

Whether his offered alternative model would and could work, is open for discussion, and I am cautious on that aspect of his work. So is Hoppe himself: he says in the book at at least two occasions, and in open words, that he sees no reason to be optimistic and that he thinks it all will go down the drain, democratically of course. The man is no dreamer.

On the German book market, recently authors from sometimes very different fields and directions support Hoppe's basic logic, and illustrate it with a plethora of examples from contemporary reality, sometimes from fields close to politics and economics, sometimes from some greater distance or from arguing in wider cultural contexts. Recently published names to mention would be Thomas Rietzschel, Frank Karsten and Karel Baumann , Christian Ortner, Roland Baader, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rahim Taghizadegan.

As I see it today, democracy is the biggest self-deception the ordinary people, we all allow us to reign our fates. It is the illusion of that we are reasonable and make reasonable decision that reflect both the immediate moment and the distant future. By that illusion we try to ennoble ourselves as mentally sane, reasonable beings. But in democracy, not only are their bad politicians, there is also the crowd that brings them to power. There are no victims, there are only accomplices in crime. And we all want to have a party while it lasts, and we do not care that we destroy the future over it. That is all what democracy is about. It encourages and brings out the worst in man. One can see that when having become familiar with the reasoning behind Hoppe's arguments. Democracy allows people to demand more than the community can afford, and it always leads to socialism and in the end communism. It necessarily must lead into total and complete collapse, inevitably.

We see it happening right now. For exactly the outlaid reasons. That the process takes years and decades, does only mean that it is slow for our perception . For history, it goes quite fast.