On Tyranny

[ripmeister]

Haven't read this guy's book but let me explain a mix of Hayek and Hoppe the danger of democracy. In a democracy the people demand more and more of the government, to give them things, to solve their problems. The leaders of a democracy have no real stake in the long term development of the nation, but only short term reelection, so they try to meet the demands of the people. In time, as the demands grow, the leaders realize, in stages, that the legislature is too slow and power shifts to the administrative branch who hands out executive orders but leaves them to the bureaucrative state to actually solve. This results in a mess of rules and rulings and so the people look for a charsimatic leader to just make executing decision and dictate solutions. The first such was Obama but he was too divisive, and now there's Trump who is likewise divisive, so we just have to wait for a savior.

Hayek's Road also goes into detail on the German political philosophers who designed the centrally planned state, a natural for Germans, from Hegel on. They saw Hitler as a disaster but predicted the State as they envisioned it would survive the loss of WWII. It has. It dominates.

Sounds interesting. Snyders book is a warning about this based on his work concerning the history of 2Oth century Europe and how people like Hitler came to power. More importantly his 20 lessons are prescriptions for how we as individuals can try and do something to avoid the same mistakes that Europe made.

[Mister D]

That Trump is a potential dictator is just too silly to comment on but there was something of interest here.

Anyone with a background in European history should know that democracy (i.e. liberal democracy) had no roots in most of Europe. Subverting an unpopular system wasn't all that difficult. What comes across time and again with liberal democrats is this assumption that their system is the best system and everyone ought to live by it. Lets get over ourselves.

[Cthulhu]

It's kind of time consuming to type everything into google translate. Much of that material only exists in books that are not online. Plus, as a person who speaks two languages, I can say that google translate has gotten better, but the translations are not perfect and sometimes really wrong.

Not to mention the many variations and dialects in single languages. Old form German vs current German.

Factoring in linguistic drift is another matter.

Sent from my evil cell phone.

[MisterVeritis]

However, tyranny can be seen in the steady depletion of human rights post 911. Additionally, the obvious hyperbole about one group or another was also a symptom in the rise of both fascism and communism. If you can find a scapegoat and people unthinkingly accept it, it becomes increasingly easy to deprive them of their rights in the name of security and order. Before they know it, they have willingly surrendered their rights and accept that any official can demand that they produce their papers (or ID in today's world). Paranoia about certain groups of people is a symptom of a society that is ripe for descent into totalitarianism. The other important ingredient in this process is unemployment. All of the nascent conditions necessary for the demise of democracy currently exists today, including a populist leader that marches to his own drummer and sees himself as a savior.

(Es)cape goats are innocent. Muslims tend to be guilty.

[The Xl]

I might suggest that we're somewhere between greed and moral decline and complacency.

We're between complacency and tyranny, imo. It's a soft form of tyranny, admittedly, but it's getting worse, and the rest of the West has it worse than us.