I'm skipping over the fact that "A little over 80 years ago Adolf Hitler came to power partly on the basis of the democratic electoral successes of the Nazi Party in German election during the Great Depression. Indeed, it is worth recalling the mass appeal that both the Nazi and Communist parties had in Germany in the early 1930s during the twilight of the Weimar Republic."

To get to the problem we face today with democracy.

DEMOCRACY IS NOT THE SAME AS FREEDOM

What is practiced in the democratic nations of the world is what in 1896 the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto called “bourgeois socialism”—the use of the state by a vast array of special-interest groups for trade protectionism, income subsidies, monetary manipulation, and domestic regulations to stifle competition.

Furthermore, Pareto also understood over a hundred years ago what Public Choice economists in the twentieth century came to call the asymmetrical incentives resulting from the concentration of benefits and the diffusion of burdens arising from government intervention in a democratic system. Explained Pareto:

“Let us suppose that in a country of thirty million inhabitants it is proposed under some pretext or other, to get each citizen to pay out one dollar a year, and to distribute the total amount amongst thirty persons. Every one of the donors will give up one dollar a year; every one of the thirty beneficiaries will receive one million dollars a year.

“The two groups will differ very greatly in their response to this situation. Those who hope to gain a million a year will know no rest day and night. They will win newspapers over to their interest by financial inducements and drum up support from all quarters. A discreet hand will warm the palms of needy legislators, even of ministers. In the United States, there is no necessity to resort to such underhand methods: these deals are made in the open; there is an open market for votes just as there are markets in cotton and grain.

“On the other hand, [Pareto continued] the despoiled are much less active. A great deal of money is needed to launch an electoral campaign. Now there are insuperable material difficulties militating again asking each citizen to contribute a few cents . . . The individual who is threatened with losing one dollar a year—even if he is fully aware of what is afoot—will not for so small a thing forego a picnic in the country, or fall out with useful or congenial friends, or to get on the wrong side of the mayor or the prefect! In these circumstances the outcome is not in doubt: the spoliators will win hands down.”

What we have, in other words, is a system of democratized plunder, under which, as Frédéric Bastiat said, everyone attempts to use the state to live at the expense of everyone else.