Democracy is not the opposite of tyranny. It is its most sophisticated form.

By Miguel Hernández

Democracy is not the opposite of tyranny. It is its most sophisticated form. Under a monarchy, the ruler at least has the incentives of an owner; he cares for the territory because it is his and he inherits it. He can be brutal, but the logic of high time preference limits him: destroying his own capital is destroying his inheritance. Democracy removes that constraint. The democratic ruler is a temporary custodian with a four-year horizon. He does not own the state apparatus; he is its user. And like any user who cannot bear the cost of depreciation, his rational incentive is to extract the maximum value in the shortest possible time. He does not conserve; he consumes. He does not invest; he redistributes. He does not plan for the long term because there is no long term for him. Hoppe formulated it correctly: democratization was not an advance of civilization but a transfer of state power from owners with incentives to conserve to temporary administrators with incentives to plunder. The data confirm the pattern. Since the democratic expansion of the 20th century, public debt as a percentage of GDP has multiplied in all Western democracies. The tax burden grew steadily. The currency was systematically devalued after the abandonment of the gold standard. The bureaucracy expanded without significant interruption, regardless of the party in power. And yet, questioning democracy is considered almost an intellectual crime. That is precisely its brilliance as a mechanism of domination: it convinces the dispossessed that they are sovereign. It grants them one vote every four years and takes forty percent of their income every day. The slave who chooses their master remains a slave, but now defends their chains because they chose them. Private property needs no democratic validation. Rights are not voted on. If three out of five people decide they can take your house, that is not popular will; it is theft by simple majority.