Mises on the Masses: Market vs. Political Democracy

There sure are a lot of people from very diverse backgrounds and intelligence levels weighing in on the god of ‘democracy’.

From actor/podcaster Russell Brand to President of the Western Hemisphere’s greatest recent success story, El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, people are feeling democratic on democracy. On the criminally unintelligent side, one finds Lindsey Graham (who doesn’t care much for American ‘democracy’ but simps hardcore for the non-existent ‘democracies’ in Ukraine and Israel) and, Kamala Harris, replete with her famous mastery of political science and philosophy.

Bukele went so far as to say to Tucker Carlson that democracy works. It’s indisputable. The United States worked.

Now, as I listened to the oddly capable and refined Bukele speak about the functionality of American democracy, I could already hear the attendant cackles–largely from the right this time, not Kamala–that of course, “The United States is not a democracy but a constitutional republic!” Imagine that retort uttered with all of the bestial blathering of those who project themselves as being superior to Joe Six-Pack because they recall watching ‘School House Rocks” in 4th grade and maintain that now-especially screeching tone and accent of mid-wittery.

You get the effect as though you were in a 3-D theater with the best of sound systems.

These are the same people who, after the Trump conviction, could not wait to trot out and supplicate themselves before any MSNBC host in order to bleat, “In America, no one–not even a former president–IS ABOVE THE LAW.” Dear God…

Of course, what Bukele offers is not a defense of democracy as an unassailable system by which a simple majority of the uninformed or the un-invested get to exercise coercive power over all. Instead, Bukele’s ‘democracy’ works as a system by which a country unites to correct course once enough individuals within it recognize that being ruled over by Satanic drug cartels and their political whores brings with it relentless ruination. The correction is a political mandate for Bukele and bitcoin. Into the penitentiaries go Beelzebub’s warlords who Bill Clinton repatriated from Los Angeles to San Salvador in the late 90s, and, wow–crime plummets. Yes, El Salvador went from the national murder capital of the world to the safest country in the Occident. That’s no accident. Neither is the country’s espousal of bitcoin as optional legal tender. Already dollarized, Salvadorans have staved off the negative impacts of Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen’s dollar-crushing machine in Washington and invited speculation and development to their beautiful land. Seigniorage and American inflationism be damned. El Salvador has none of the banking titans who benefit so early and easily from the dollar printing press. It does not have weapons manufactures plying their lethal trade assembling cluster bombs to send to Kiev and Tel Aviv destined to fall on Russia and Gazan children. Salvadorans get none of the welfare nor social safety nets whose immense expense remains the primary cause of all of that inflation. Whereas the dollar is sweating, bitcoin is gaining as an alternative. Gold too. And, unlike the United States, the El Salvadoran governments have no precedent–even the most devilish ones of the past–in enacting laws to seize gold. Your FDR fan will tell you that not all of the gold was seized by the Feds during the Depression–you were allowed to keep your wedding bands. Quelle gentillesse!

Bukele’s ‘democracy’ works until it doesn’t. Paine, Franklin, Tyler, and Cleveland’s ‘democracy’ worked–until it didn’t. And boy, when it stops working–look out. It appears that just a small spoonful of decadence makes democracy go down. Decadence is endemic to democracy.

To be sure, political democracy is the God that failed and anyone who disagrees with Hans-Hermann Hoppe on this is just not that bright.

On the other hand, whether it is in San Salvador, Buenos Aires, Tbilisi or your local downtown, market democracy rolls on.

It is a wild thing that years before I read Ludwig von Mises at all, much less studied his work with the attention to which I am justly (albeit belatedly) paying to it now, I deduced a large number of these truths on my own. Better, I figured these economic dynamics out with the grace of the Holy Spirit, my Guardian Angel, and my patron saints. You doubt this, but you should not; after all, I pleaded with God before every class I taught for knowledge and wisdom. I prayed that I might then be His humble servant in distilling and explicating that to my students, His precious children.

My prayers were answered, especially when I hit on money mechanics, malinvestment, fractional reserve banking, free trade, and social cooperation.

Validation represents just one of the multitude of fruits now enjoyed as I read Human Action from cover to cover. The absolute, perspicacious brilliance of the work is the pineapple or Moldovan strawberry (my friend James Delingpole says they are the best).

Whereas politicians in democracies only calculate in expressions of units of power claimed through law and vote, Mises rightly asserted that, “[t]he market economy is real because it can calculate.” (Human Action 260) Entrepreneurs and consumers are forever calculating and forecasting while acting in subjective freedom to determine just how to satisfy what Mises refers to as this innate need to quell our natural and inevitable state of “uneasiness”. While political democracy goads people stuck in the morass of propaganda, ignorance and inertia to vote for their overseers, each economic decision in the market is an instructive signal of what the economic agent actually values. A farmer, wishing then calculating that a loan, even with a high interest rate, is preferable to seeing his fields dry up and lay fallow, is an economic actor. The farmer’s neighbor calculates poorly. He might blindly trust his almanac or swear off looking for any credit from those “damn bankers”. His attribution of bankers’ eternal, general destination might be spot on, but not his calculation. On the other side of the coin, what of the banker who examines the prospects of Farmer #1 seeking the loan, understands his situation and prospects, and extends the loan–maybe even at a few bips under the going interest rate? Banker #1 is rewarded for his work, his assessment, when Farmer #1 pays back the principle with interest. Banker #2 carries with him all of the snobbery of a yuppie. He doesn’t work with bumpkins; only with billionaire tech start ups. The #2’s are #2’s for a number of reasons and the market ensures their status. Perhaps they will learn from their errors; perhaps not. Either way, the market will account for them.

From Mises: “[A] democratic constitution is a scheme to assign to the citizens in the conduct of a government the same supremacy the market economy gives them in their capacity as consumers.” (Human Action 271) And, despite their unveiled ignorance, our state captors sense the inherent inferiority of their system to the market. This sense goes far into explaining why so many of them have such antipathy towards the market.

Slavery comes not from market democracy but from submission to a political class drunk on illusions of the superiority of political democracy. The current oligarchs with democratic masks wish to determine where and how you work; how much you “owe” them; what you should produce; what you should consume; what should be on your vaccine schedule; what should be (ironically) your cow’s vaccine schedule. Holy cow–there’s nothing left for us to truly elect.

“Modern capitalism is essentially mass production for the needs of the masses.” (Human Action 587) And that’s what the THEY hate the most about it.