Property, Freedom & Society

24 The Trouble with Democracy:
Maslow Meets Hoppe

Doug French

H.L. Mencken described politicians as “men who, at some time or other, have compromised with their honour, either by swallowing their convictions or by whooping for what they believe to be untrue.”1 “Vanity remains to him,” Mencken wrote, “but not pride.”2

The Sage of Baltimore had it correct, that to be elected and stay elected in American politics to any full-time position requires the suspension of any ethics or good sense a person may possess. Even those who begin political careers with the best intentions and have measurable abilities that would make them successful in any field soon realize that the skills required to succeed in politics are not those required outside politics.

Lew Rockwell explains that, while competition in the marketplace improves quality, competition in politics does just the opposite:

The only improvements take place in the process of doing bad things: lying, cheating, manipulating, stealing, and killing. The price of political services is constantly increasing, whether in tax dollars paid or in the bribes owed for protection (also known as campaign contributions). There is no obsolescence, planned or otherwise. And as Hayek famously argued, in politics, the worst get on top. And there is no accountability: the higher the office, the more criminal wrongdoing a person can get away with.3

Thus it becomes “a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union,”4 wrote Mencken. Democracy makes it possible for the demagogue to inflame the childish imagination of the masses, “by virtue of his talent for nonsense.”5 The king can do the same thing in a monarchy but only by virtue of his birth.

In stark contrast, in the natural order, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains in his monumental work, Democracy—The God that Failed, it is “private property, production, and voluntary exchange that are the ultimate sources of human civilization.”6 This natural order, Hoppe notes, must be maintained by a natural elite which would come by these positions of “natural authority,” not by election as in the case of democracy, or birth as in the case of monarchy, but by their “superior achievements, of wealth, wisdom, bravery or a combination thereof.”7 This is just the opposite of what Mencken and Rockwell describe as a characteristic of democracy.

Instead, democracy affords the opportunity for anyone to pursue politics as a career. There is no need for the masses to recognize a person as “wise” or “successful,” as Hoppe’s natural order would require. Nor does one have to be born into the ruling family, as in the case of monarchy. As the great American comedian, Bob Hope, who was actually born in England, once quipped, “I left England at the age of four when I found out I couldn’t be king.” Maybe because he knows he can never have Prince Charles’s job, Sir Richard Branson—knighted for “services to entrepreneurship”—sticks to business and reportedly owns 360 companies.

But, as Hoppe explains, democracies have expanded, and since World War I have been viewed as the only legitimate form of government. In turn, more people who have been successful at other pursuits are running for political office or becoming politically active. For instance, more and more wealthy billionaires are entering the political arena. While the wealthy tycoons of a previous generation were private and tended to covet seclusion, today’s captains of industry such as Ross Perot, Michael Bloomberg, and Jon Corzine are running for office. And while Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and George Soros haven’t sought public office personally, they spend millions of dollars on political contributions and are visible in trying to sway the public debate on political issues, when their time would obviously be more productively spent (both for them and everyone else) on other, wealth-creating endeavors. Plus, a quarter of all House members and a third of all members of the Senate are millionaires.8

There may be politicians that pursue elected office for the money, but many elected officials are already wealthy by most people’s standards. What makes the wealthy and otherwise successful want to hold office? Is it as Charles Derber describes in The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life, that politicians since “Caesar and Napoleon have been driven by overweening egos and an insatiable hunger for public adulation”?9

The work of psychologist Abraham Maslow may provide an understanding as to why even successful entrepreneurs would seek public office. Maslow is famous for his “hierarchy of needs” theory that is taught in most management classes in American universities. The theory is generally presented visually as a pyramid, with the lowest or most basic human need—physiological need—shown as a layer along the base of the pyramid.

Maslow’s view was that the basic human needs—thirst, hunger, breathing—must be satisfied before humans could accomplish or worry about anything else. The next tranche within the pyramid, shown on top of the physiological need, is the safety need. After satisfying thirst and hunger, humans are concerned about their continued survival. If a man is constantly worried about being eaten by a tiger, he doesn’t concern himself with much else.

The next layer presented within Maslow’s pyramid is the belonging need, which lies just above safety need. After the satisfaction of the two lower needs—physiological and safety—a person seeks love, friendships, companionship and community. Once this need is satisfied, according to Maslow, humans seek the esteem need. These first four needs were considered deficit needs. If a person is lacking, there is a motivation to fill that need. Once the particular need is filled, the motivation abates. This makes these needs different than the need at the top of Maslow’s pyramid, the need for self-actualization. The need for self-actualization is never satisfied, and Maslow referred to it as a being need, or to be all you can be.

Thus, humans continually strive to satisfy their needs, and as the more basic needs are satisfied, humans move up the pyramid, if you will, to satisfy higher level needs. Of course, different humans achieve different levels, and it was Maslow’s view that only two percent of humans become self-actualizing. Maslow studied some famous people along with a dozen not-so-famous folks and developed some personality traits that were consistent with people he judged to be self-actualizing. Besides being creative and inventive, self-actualizers have strong ethics, a self-deprecating sense of humor, humility and respect for others, resistance to enculturation, enjoyment of autonomy and solitude instead of shallow relationships with many people. They believe the ends don’t necessarily justify the means and that the means can be ends in themselves.

One readily sees that Maslow’s self-actualizers have nothing in common with politicians in a democracy, but closely fit the profile that Hoppe describes of the natural elite that would lead a natural order. But a step down from the top of the hierarchy of needs pyramid is the need for esteem. Maslow described two types of esteem needs according to Maslow expert Dr. C. George Boeree, a lower esteem need and a higher one. And while the higher form of esteem calls for healthy attributes such as freedom, independence, confidence and achievement, the lower form “is the need for the respect of others, the need for status, fame, glory, recognition, attention, reputation, appreciation, dignity, even dominance.”

“The negative version of these needs is low self-esteem and inferiority complexes,” Dr. Boeree writes. “Maslow felt [Alfred] Adler was really onto something when he proposed that these were at the roots of many, if not most, of our psychological problems.”10

Now we see the qualities displayed by virtually all politicians in democracy: the constant need for status and recognition. The ends—compensating for an inferiority complex—justify whatever Machiavellian means.

Because democracy is open to any and all who can get themselves elected, either through connections, personality, or personal wealth, it is a social system where leadership positions become a hotbed for sociopaths. Maslow’s self-actualizing man won’t have an interest in politics. But those stuck on the need for esteem are drawn to it like flies to dung.

With leadership in such dysfunctional hands, it is no wonder. “In comparison to the nineteenth century, the cognitive prowess of the political and intellectual elites and the quality of public education have declined,” Hoppe writes in Democracy.11 “And the rates of crime, structural unemployment, welfare dependency, parasitism, negligence, recklessness, incivility, psychopathy, and hedonism have increased.”12

So while the electorate recognizes that they are electing, at best incompetents, and at worst crooks, the constant, naïve, pro-democracy mantra is that “we just need to elect the right people.” But, the “right people” aren’t (and won’t be) running for office. Instead, we will continue to have “the average American legislator [who] is not only an ass,” as Mencken wrote, “but also an oblique, sinister, depraved and knavish fellow. . .”13

 

                             

Doug French (douglasinvegas@gmail.com) received his Masters degree in economics from the University of Nevada Las Vegas under Murray Rothbard with Professor Hoppe serving on his thesis committee. He, along with Deanna Forbush, was a benefactor for the publication of the second edition of Hoppe’s The Economics and Ethics of Private Property. French is the President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

14H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), pp. 114–15.

15Ibid., p. 115.

16Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., “Two Kinds of Competition,” LewRockwell.com (August 12, 2004).

17Mencken, Notes on Democracy, p. 115.

18H.L. Mencken, The Gist of Mencken: Quotations from America’s Critic, Mayo DuBasky, ed. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990), p. 352; originally from H.L. Mencken, “Off Again, On Again,” Smart Set (March 1922), p. 50.

19Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. 71.

20Ibid.

21See “Net Worth, 2007,” OpenSecrets.org <www.opensecrets.org/pfds/overview.php> (accessed December 15, 2008); also “Millionaires Fill US Congress Halls,” Agence France Presse <www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0630-05.htm> (June 30, 2004); Sean Loughlin and Robert Yoon, “Millionaires Populate U.S. Senate,” CNN.com <www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/06/13/senators.finances/ > (June 13, 2003).

22Charles Derber, The Pursuit of Attention: Power and Ego in Everyday Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xxii.

23C. George Boeree, “Abraham Maslow,” www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/maslow.html (accessed December 15, 2008).

24Hoppe, Democracy, p. 42.

25Ibid., p. 43.

26The Gist of Mencken, p. 423; originally from H.L. Mencken, “The Free Lance,” Baltimore Evening Sun (January 10, 1913).

• 1Professors Hoppe’s publications, including links to translations and a detailed bibliography, are available at his website, www.hanshoppe.com.
• 2“Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Potret Intelektual Anti-Intelektual” [“Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Anti-Intellectual Intellectual”], interview by Sukasah Syahdan, Akal dan Kehendak (Indonesia) (Apr. 28, 2008) (English translation available at www.hanshoppe.com/publications).
• 3“Principles of the Property and Freedom Society,” available at www.propertyandfreedom.org (quoting the Opening Declaration from the Inaugural Meeting: Bodrum, Turkey, May 2006).
• 4Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), chs. 2 & 7; idem, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006 [1993]), chs. 11–13, 15, and “Appendix: Four Critical Replies.”
• 5Idem, Democracy.
• 6Idem, “Government and the Private Production of Defense,” in idem, ed., The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2003).
• 7On immigration, see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Case for Free Trade and Restricted Immigration,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 221–33; idem, “Natural Order, the State, and the Immigration Problem,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 16, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 75–97.
• 8Idem, “On Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization,” p. 24, n. 25.
• 9Cf. Hoppe’s discussion of Robert Nozick’s “disparate or loosely jointed arguments, conjectures, puzzles, counterexamples, experiments, paradoxes, surprising turns, startling twists, intellectual flashes, and philosophical razzle-dazzle,” in “Murray N. Rothbard and the Ethics of Liberty,” Introduction to Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, 2nd ed. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998), pp. xxiv.
• 10Stephan Kinsella & Jeffrey Tucker, “The Ordeal of Hoppe,” The Free Market 26, no. 4 (April 2005).
• 11Ibid., p. 71; and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Eigentum, Anarchie und Staat: Studien zur Theorie des Kapitalismus (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987).
• 12Hoppe, Democracy, p. 74; and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy (Boston: Kluwer, 1993).
• 13Hoppe, Democracy, p. 71.
• 14Eventually, Hoppe turned into a full-blown Austrian when, in the early 1980s, he went to the United States on a prestigious Heisenberg fellowship. This time his research project concerned political philosophy, but it was again squarely built on Austrian economics. In 1986, he became Rothbard’s colleague at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where he would teach for the next 21 years. After Rothbard’s untimely death in 1995, Professor Hoppe assumed a place of uncontested leadership among Austro-libertarian scholars, becoming the editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, a co-editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, and then a co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Professor Hoppe, now Professor Emeritus of Economics at UNLV and Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, also serves on on the editorial board of Libertarian Papers. In addition to authoring numerous scholarly articles, his important books include Handeln und Erkennen (1976), Kritik der Kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (1983), Eigentum, Anarchie, und Staat (1987), A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989), The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993, enlarged 2nd edition 2006), Democracy—The God that Failed (2001), and The Myth of National Defense (editor, 2003). His works have been translated into at least 21 languages, not counting English.
• 15Among Professor Hoppe’s many achievements we should stress in particular his brilliant critique of positivist methodology as applied to the social sciences, a new praxeological approach to political philosophy, an encompassing comparative analysis of socialism and capitalism, and a theory of secession as a means of political reform. Most importantly, in his book Democracy—The God that Failed, Professor Hoppe has delivered a profound critique of democracy, as well as an original reinterpretation of Western history in the twentieth century, both of which have stirred international debate in academia and among the wider public. Other influential works from his pen have dealt with the role of migrations within a free society, and with the role of public intellectuals in political transformation processes. Moreover, he has excelled as an historian of thought and made path-breaking contributions to other areas such as monopoly theory; the theory of public goods; the sociology of taxation; the positive methodology of the social sciences; the theory of risk; the production of security; the transformation of formerly socialist countries; and the evolution of monetary institutions and their impact on international relations. And Professor Hoppe’s work is ongoing: he is currently working on a major book project that will restate and elaborate on his previous work in the fields of epistemology and ethics—more generally, the nature of human rationality. The goal of the book is to provide “a systematic and interdisciplinary reconstruction of human history (pre-history, hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies, industrial societies).”
• 16for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one’s personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of “outcome” or “opportunity,” and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians.
• 17Hoppe’s axiom of private property is also of crucial importance. If you debate about ethical issues, it means that you presuppose your own right, as well as the right of other people, to debate the issue. This acceptance implies that you do respect the rights of others people involved in the debate to control their own bodies. And the conclusion is crucial: if you even begin debating what is right and what is wrong, it means that you already have acknowledged that private property is necessary and inescapable for any moral judgment. This applies even to those who try to argue against private property. The ethical ground for private property has never been so strong and deep before.
• 18There are also many other fields where Hans Hoppe has pushed the limits of political and economic science. Monarchy is not as bad as democracy, he argues. This was and still is unacceptable to many intellectuals, and most people have followed the lead of the intellectuals because they have had no good arguments to the contrary. A simple reference to the “strong hand” of a dictator was not only politically incorrect and old fashioned, but also contrary to the goals and the image of society most people actually have. Hoppe provides a clear explanation to sort through this intellectual mess. The absence of democracy in public decision-making does not necessarily mean dictatorship and the most terrible exploitation of the people. On the contrary: democracy is the system which leads to dictatorship, exploitation of others, ignorance, and vulgarity.
• 19The private provision of security is another topic which has benefitted from Hoppe’s insights. Every decent person often feels that the police are actually not providing adequate protection. But what is the alternative? Better this than nothing, or so many of those unsatisfied with government tend to conclude. An army of intellectuals is ready to help them reach this conclusion. Hoppe provides sound arguments and explains the economics of the private production of defense. No serious scholar can ignore Hoppe’s important arguments. Those who claim that there will be no security without government are simply mistaken. Now, you can direct them to Hans Hoppe’s works.
• 20Immigration, democracy, regulation—so many bad ideas abound concerning all of these issues, and Hoppe addresses them so well in his writings and speeches.
• 21Hans knows how to present an argument in a way which is very understandable, even to a man of average intellectual capacities. His examples are sometimes so unexpected and direct that they really help or even force you to rethink what you have thought about the world before. It appears very natural for him, for example, to put a footnote in a book with a short explanation why public slavery is even worse than private slavery. It does not mean that Hans tries to be simple. He is just very straightforward. He does not hesitate to criticize even free-market advocates who are not consistent in their argumentation. If you say something absurd or make flawed arguments, he usually will not hide the fact from you. Perhaps for this reason, some people even seem to be intimidated by Hans Hoppe. Understandably, it is not always pleasant to have your arguments smashed in public.
• 22Hans does not present himself as a big scholar. On the contrary, his ambition is not very great when he speaks about the role of the scholar (including himself) in society. It is not his ambition to invent some completely new theory or find a terra incognito. On the contrary, Hoppe claims that the role of a decent scholar is, first of all, to preserve what is already found, explained, and discovered. Not to waste the knowledge of the mankind, but to preserve and explain it in modern language to new generations, is to him an already ambitious task. He does it perfectly. Contrary to many of those who are happy with their ambitious and often fallacious new theories, or with “philosophical razzle-dazzle,” he is always stressing the role of his teachers and predecessors, Rothbard and Mises.
• 23Courage is another thing which goes well with Hans Hoppe’s name. Political correctness is not a good principle to hold to when you are looking for the truth, and while many people pay lip service to the importance of truth, not everyone will defend it even when his own career and name are at stake. But when liberty and the truth are at the stake, Hans Hoppe will never give up. The well-known controversy surrounding an example given about the different time preferences among different groups of people perfectly illustrates this courage.
• 24Significantly, Hans does not hold back in criticizing monarchies for doing in a quite primitive way what democratic administrations have succeeded in accomplishing with less fallout, which is monopolizing power. Like democrats, kings tried to marginalize their opposition by declaring all political authority to be a prerogative of the centralized state. Monarchical sovereignty was a prelude to democratic sovereignty, and it was based the same “original sin,” “the monopolization of the function of judge and peacemaker.” The best form of authority for Hans is, in fact, “the natural order,” one that is “[t]he natural outcome of the voluntary transactions between various private property owners” and which is “decidedly nonegalitarian, hierarchical, and elitist.” Any effort to bring this about in our democratic, late modernity is hailed as a positive step: “Thus, in addition to advocating the abdication of democracy, it is now of central strategic importance that at the same time ideological support be given to all decentralizing or even secessionist social forces.”
• 25Significantly, Hans does not hold back in criticizing monarchies for doing in a quite primitive way what democratic administrations have succeeded in accomplishing with less fallout, which is monopolizing power. Like democrats, kings tried to marginalize their opposition by declaring all political authority to be a prerogative of the centralized state. Monarchical sovereignty was a prelude to democratic sovereignty, and it was based the same “original sin,” “the monopolization of the function of judge and peacemaker.” The best form of authority for Hans is, in fact, “the natural order,” one that is “[t]he natural outcome of the voluntary transactions between various private property owners” and which is “decidedly nonegalitarian, hierarchical, and elitist.” Any effort to bring this about in our democratic, late modernity is hailed as a positive step: “Thus, in addition to advocating the abdication of democracy, it is now of central strategic importance that at the same time ideological support be given to all decentralizing or even secessionist social forces.”
• 26A question that might be raised is whether the generality of humankind would endorse the tendencies that Hans is promoting. Would democratic populations (who have ceased to be citoyens (citizens) or Staatsbürger in any meaningful sense) really want to live in the decentralized, elitist society that Hans recommends, one in which a “natural elite” possess “natural authority,” and, because of “selective mating” and the “laws of civil and genetic inheritance,” these “positions of natural authority are more likely than not passed on within a few noble families.” Why would the majority want to acknowledge these “authority persons,” who presumably would arbitrate conflicts on the basis of the social deference that others extend to them? It is hard to see why most people would accept such arrangements, as opposed to a democracy, in which the promise is made and often fulfilled of redistributing goods to the voters. The question is not whether the democratic state robs from Peter to pay Paul (it obviously does that!) but whether Hans’s “natural order” offers most people what they want. The answer is an emphatic “no” and therefore this order (which looks a bit like Friedrich Hayek’s conception of “spontaneous order”) depends for its realization on the possibility of “decentralization and secession.” Absent such a possibility, this order is in no way feasible.