does the resulting collapse of various nationalised institutions eventually destroy the democratic process itself in favour of private property and economising scarce resources through it?
To quickly explain what I mean, when governments keep borrowing more and more money to keep up their huge spending, until their deficits go out of control, the civil servants will never vote for governments to cut down their pensions, salaries, or their jobs. Nor will ordinary citizens vote for removal of public services to which they are so wedded, especially not public schools. Nor will the taxpaying citizens choose to bear even more of a tax burden to pay off the debt or bear the cost of the services that everybody else wants to continue using.
So eventually, the government itself runs out of capital and collapses - what happens next? Would they somehow still prop up the democratic government and get it to still beg, borrow, or steal and put even more of a cost on its citizens to keep up what it was doing forever? Or could that be one big finishing line for a long time for trying to vote on usage of resources through other people’s property?
This all depends on what people believe. As long as people believe in astrology, you will see that stupid stuff in the papers. No matter how many times it is wrong, totally unambiguous, or nonsensical.
If a government collapses due to expropriation of all capital goods in a society, that doesn’t mean people understand the relation between the two, and know of an alternative.
This is why, more than anything, they need to understand logic, logical fallacies, and praxeology (and apply that to all facets of life, not just goods and services).
I actually agree with Nielsio on this. But I think that even if people were to see the collapse of government as a failure of government or, in an-cap terms, as the inevitable consequence OF government, that may not change how people pick up the pieces. Because I think people realize that everything involves trade offs.
As you pointed out, everyone knows (at least intuitively) that one of the benefits of government and the services it can provide is that someone else gets to pay for them. Or at least that the cost gets spread out amongst all the taxpayers and so some things that would be otherwise impossible become possible and vice versa. This is always going to be appealing to some people. And I mean can you really blame people for wanting things for free? I know I can’t. I just understand that nothing IS free. Somewhere there’s a cost for everything.
There’s also the split between those who prefer the “raising all boats in general” effect of the market and those who find this as unfair and not predictable enough in terms of outcome and so they prefer the more “raising particular boats” effect of the government. After all, the market cannot pick arbitrary winners and losers as well as government can and for some, that’s a benefit of government for others it’s a benefit of the market. This could also be called the split between implicit aid and explicit aid.
What I’m trying to say is that even if people came to believe that certain calamities were inevitable with governments, they may still choose governments for the benefits that are inevitable under governments. I say this with firm conviction because I know that people tend to be very good at weighing costs and benefits even if they don’t consciously think about it. No system is perfect and no system is without cost and/or flaw and so ultimately, the choice of government or no government is a question of “which would you prefer?”
Whether or not a big systemic shock actually shakes people out of their current preference or not is pure supposition, but I speculate that for a good number of people, even the inevitable collapse of big governments (or governments in general) will not be enough to alter their present convictions. Because we all know somewhere deep down that everything has a price.
“But what is government if not the ultimate reflection of human nature?”
I recently listened to one of the Individual Lectures series by Murray Rothbard just when the USSR collapsed and he remarked on whether people would choose freedom over tyranny. I think his answer was that the USSR’s attempt to create a ‘new soviet man’ was a utter failure evidenced by the fact that the citizens of communist countries born after their respective revolutions both ultimately rejected their governments legitimacy and the ‘superiority’ the communist system.
Although, I also remember reading, from LewRockwell.com, that the Tiananmen Square Protest was actually demanding that Beijing reverse the free-market reforms of the 80s to return to communism, as the about-to-graduate students were terrified of the prospect of having to compete for jobs in an open market.
Even though the above, if true, is something we here would dispute, nonetheless it also fits Murray’s point. There seems to be a threshold whereby people’s tolerance of real and perceived failure is reached, so they act – regardless of the intellectual environment around them, or what the government is saying.
Murray’s lecture was an response to others (libertarians included) who, even in the late 80s, expected the USSR (and communism/socialism) to last well into future as a ‘permanent fixture’ and that this new soviet man was a reality, therefore, there was little point in reaching out to them, or, even opposing ‘third way’ policies in the West itself.
Democratic government always heads for bankruptcy, whereas kings could manage to stay solvent as long as any ordinary shop can. What normally happens is that the government goes bankrupt, and than a few years of unrest begin and one massive democracy is substituted for several small oligarchies, and than the process of re-aggregation into one democratic state begins anew. Once the devils of democracy have been let out there’s no caging them back. No amount of ideas will help.