Last week in the Wall Street Journal Walter Russell Mead
gave his opinion that the “Crisis of Democracy” in the modern world is a bit
exaggerated (“The “Crisis of Democracy” Is Overhyped,” WSJ, 08/28/18, A-13). According
to Mead, the democracies are, if not precisely doing-just-fine-thank-you, at
least doing better than the non-democracies.
That’s not really
a fair or even legitimate comparison, however.
It’s like saying that a man with pneumonia is doing better than one with
congestive heart failure. The former can
be cleared up in most cases with a shot or two of penicillin, while the latter
needs open heart surgery, assuming it is even feasible.
The problem, of
course, is that if the man with pneumonia doesn’t get any penicillin, he could die
just as easily as the man with heart failure.
He’s only better off if the right thing is done to keep him alive.
So, yes, the
liberal (a rather loaded word if you’ve been reading this blog regularly . . .
along with “conservative”) Western democracies are doing better than the
various authoritarian states and governments . . . which isn’t to say that they
are doing at all well, except by comparison.
The man who fell off the hundred story building was doing all right
until the end. . . .
The fact is, the
liberal Western democracies are in just as much trouble as the authoritarian
non-democracies. There is one
significant fact that virtually everyone overlooks these days, and except for a
few lone voices crying in the wilderness for the past two hundred and fifty
years or so has been ignored since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
That is the double
whammy of advancing technology that is too expensive for ordinary people to
purchase with their current resources and at the same time displaces them from
their jobs. Not only do they lose their
primary source of income, they have no way of being productive, and can
therefore only participate in society at the behest of those who are
productive.
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| Hilaire Belloc |
This is Hilaire
Belloc’s “Servile State” with a vengeance.
Neither capitalist nor socialist, but a merging of the worst aspects of
both systems, the Servile State is an arrangement of society in which the great
mass of people are dependent on others for their livelihood, and even for the
manner in which they are permitted to exist.
Ownership of capital — and thus power — is concentrated, and thus
control over the lives of others is not merely maximized, it becomes almost
total.
The answer? It isn’t found in increased funding for
social programs. These differ only in
degree, not in kind between socialist and capitalist economies. As human labor becomes relatively more expensive
than technology in the production process, the burden of providing sufficient
consumption income to keep the economy running shifts more and more to the
State. Eventually the State becomes so
overburdened with its growing and sometimes contradictory roles that it finally
implodes. As Pope Pius XI noted,
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| Pope Pius XI |
When we speak of the reform of institutions, the State
comes chiefly to mind, not as if universal well-being were to be expected from
its activity, but because things have come to such a pass through the evil of
what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near
extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through
associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the
State. This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of
social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the
wrecked associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by
almost infinite tasks and duties. (Quadragesimo Anno, § 78.)
Nor is there any
difference between the liberal democracies and the authoritarian tyrannies, at
least where the end result is concerned.
It just takes a little bit longer for the liberal democracies to hit
bottom . . . unless, like Greece, they’ve been just a little bit too liberal and run up the debt to about
180% or so of GDP to fund all the government programs.
Frankly,
political democracy cannot survive except on a solid foundation of economic
democracy — and as the case of Greece and a number of other liberal democracies
have graphically demonstrated, that doesn’t mean equal economic benefits for
all. No, it means equal economic
opportunity and access to the means of acquiring and possessing private
property in capital for all.
And that means a
program along the lines of a Capital
Homestead Act, by whatever name you want to call it.
And the sooner
the better.
#30#
