The Tyranny of the Majority, vs the Unanimity of Liberty
T
he Founding Fathers despised democracy. They called the idea of 51% voting to impose its will the “violence of majority faction“. Poor Thomas Jefferson spent a great deal of effort and political capital proving he wasn’t a closet democrat. When writing Democracy in America, French philosopher Alexis DeToqueville coined the phrase Tyranny of the Majority referring to an idea from Plato’s Republic.
Majority rule imposes the will of a mere half of the population, plus one vote, upon minorities in each issue.
It is just as wrong to violate someone else's rights, even if you outnumber them and have a vote
You need only to look at how this impacted blacks in the US to understand how evil majority rule over the minority is.
The Founders sought to solve this problem, by banning democracy in America, setting up a Republic where the majority could never legally vote to violate the natural rights of the minority. The only powers allowed to the Federal government were those listed in the Constitution, with the 9th and 10th articles of the Bill of Rights banning it from doing anything else, even if the majority voted for it.
Majority as Consensus
Of course the Federal government has been corrupted enough to overstep its legitimate authority, but that’s another article.
The modern apologists for majority rule, who unfortunately have managed to get the word “democracy” spun into a positive thing in public schools, defend their tyranny over minorities by saying “hey, at least we can be sure that there isn’t a larger group who opposes a vote, than the group who supports it”.
Advocates of liberty, though, object that you still should not violate the will of ANY people, in a free society. They say that you have no more authority to violate the rights of another because you are a large group, than if you are one man trying to impose your will on your neighbor. At least not legitimately.
Of course, the obvious retort is “hey, the only way to solve the problem of having minorities on issues is to have a unanimous vote…and that’s impossible! If we depended on unanimity, then nothing would ever get accomplished at all!”
But this isn’t true:
Unanimous Self-Government
A free market is based, purely, on unanimity.
This is because the fundamental principle of liberty is private property:
Each person is a government of one, over his rightful possessions, starting with his own body.
But if someone wanted a vote on what everyone in the country is going to have for supper tonight, the odds are that he would not be able to get everyone to agree on the same thing. So if this were a power of the government, up to half of the population, minus one vote, would have their right to choose what to eat violated.
Of course that’s if there are only two options…which is a sort of farce of an election in the first place. With a real selection of all things people might reasonably desire for supper, probably more than 99% of people will be forced to eat something they would not have chosen.
And, let’s face it, with how goofy people are, you’re almost always going to end up being forced to eat something you don’t even like, much less want for tonight.
Eccentric sitcom character Mrs. Slocombe used to emphasize a decision by saying "and I am unanimous in that!"
On the other hand, if each man governs his own life, as in a free market, then you may choose not only exactly what to eat, but even when to eat it.
Every time you are hungry, there is a vote, and you are unanimous. Sure, it’s limited to what you can afford, but what better way to determine what a meal is worth than that? Imagine if the majority were always voting themselves caviar and steak, bankrupting society.
With majority rule, you only get rare input at all, and only one option is selected, with most people being losers in the process.
But with the free market, you vote every instant, of every day, and are able to reverse yourself at will.
Of course, this also applies to groups, not just individuals, because their membership is purely voluntary, unlike an authoritarian government:
Sure, your chess club or paintball team may have majority votes, but your participation in them is purely consensual. Each moment of your life, you are free to leave, and if you stay you are voting unanimously for your own membership.
If you leave an organization in a free society, they are not going to blockade your house until you’re forced to fire on them, and then claim you started a hostilities, invade, and conquer you.
If the majority of your local town council votes to condemn your perfectly sound family home, just to put up a strip mall that will bring them more tax money and campaign contributions, it does this in violation of the unanimity of private property rights, and you can’t simply withdraw your membership.
Don’t worry; in two years you’ll be allowed to cast a single vote against at least one of those politicians who stole your home…if you still live in town, and at a legal residence, not in a cardboard box.
You might even try to get 51% of all voters in your city to set aside all other issues and vote for the single challenger to each of those bad politicians.
Of course, if your private property rights were protected as they should be, you wouldn’t be in this predicament. Maybe you should just push for laws protecting those rights in general, so such things couldn’t happen in the first place.
While majority rule imposes tyranny over minorities, capitalism, through private property rights, protects even the smallest minority, that of the individual, with unanimity.
Words of the Sentient:
The political principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate.
— Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, The New York Times Magazine
Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority
— James Madison, Federalist Papers #10
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
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This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
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But Now You Know 
I cannot put into words how angry that picture of the scale makes me
Then why bother commenting at all? As it is, you have not even established which way it angers you. For example, maybe you’re angry because the tyranny of the majority is so evil that it oppressed blacks. Or maybe you’re politically correct and think that entirely accurate graphic shouldn’t be allowed. Or maybe you hate scales. Or object to the abbreviation of the word “pound”.
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[…] from a potentially over-bearing majority. As the American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke put it (rather frivolously, in this context): “Imagine if all of life were determined by majority rule. […]
Big fan of real liberty…not so much of being a “subject” of anyone or anything.
We have lost so much of it, we hardly know what liberty means!
Lots of people blog about this issue but you wrote down some true words.
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Good to see that people still know what they are talking about. So much BS around these days!
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Ben Hoffman-
Jefferson supported a separation of church and state which PROTECTED religion from government, not kicked people of faith out of state-sponsored territory. This is a modern-day conservative interpretation of the separation of church and state. Also, he did not support an income tax, which was unconstitutional at the time. He was an idealist who favored a limited form of government. Look at the fine print in the history books.
Jefferson was a liberal. He was for a graduated income tax, for a separation of church and state, for public funding for higher education, warned of corporate power in government, and rejected the belief in supernatural entities in religion.
You might do better to quote John Adams. He was more of a conservative.
Ben, you’re going to have to cite some hard evidence to support this rather bizarre rewriting of history.
Jefferson was a classic liberal, which makes him the polar opposite of a modern Liberal. He believed in the very most limited government. Were he alive today, his platform would be nearly identical to that of Ron Paul, and he’d probably cite Reagan as his favorite president, based on political platform.
Adams, on the other hand, was a believer in relatively centralized government authority, like a modern Liberal. He wanted to censor speech he found offensive, to print money without restraint, to gather power in the hands of the Federal government, et cetera. He was still far less authoritarian than a modern Liberal, but more along those lines, along with Hamilton.
Jefferson, and the Founders in general, meant the first amendment to prevent the establishment of a state religion. It was not, in any way, intended to forbid religious expression on the part of government officials, or the placement of manger scenes in city parks, or the ten commandments in courthouses.
The premise that he would support a redistributive income tax is laughable. Such a punishment of productivity violates every American principle of justice and liberty.
The same goes for coercive funding of education.
He was, of course, a Deist, like most of the Founders. This is not the same as rejecting all things supernatural, except insofar as he considered the Creator to be a natural phenomenon.
Here, a collection of quotes from Jefferson that go against anything you’d ever see Clinton or Obama say, but that you could slip into any Paul or Reagan speech and it would be accepted as perfectly normal:
Words of the Sentient:
A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.
– Thomas Jefferson
Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him?
– Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (1801)
The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits.
-Thomas Jefferson
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg.
-Thomas Jefferson
No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
– Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution, June 1776 1 Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C. J. Boyd, Ed., 1950)
In political economy, I think Smith’s Wealth of Nations the best book extant; in the science of government, Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws is generally recommended.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Randolph, 1790
Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want of bread.
-Thomas Jefferson
As, for the safety of soceity, we commit honest maniacs to Bedlam, so judges should be withdrawn from their bench, whose erroneous biases are leading us to dissolution.
-Thomas Jefferson
Our legislators are not sufficiently appraised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us.
– Thomas Jefferson
You’re taking quotes out of context, Kaz. Here is a paragraph from a letter Jefferson wrote to Alexander Hammilton:
“The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers, and tradesmen, and lastly the class of labouring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are kept idle mostly for the aske of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be laboured. I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_James_Madison_-_October_28,_1785
That, my friend, is the philosophy of a liberal. :)
Surely you don’t think the above advocates an income tax. It almost certainly refers to a property tax.
But even then, it is just an isolated letter, not a proof of his position. You can find early letters by Reagan and Robert Heinlein advocating similarly silly pro-government-intervention nonsense. Were I wont to write letters back then, you could find me advocating a number of positions I now oppose, too.
By the time Jefferson was president, and for all we know perhaps the very next day after he wrote the letter you cite, his distrust in government and abhorrence of such coercion was quite intact.
You want quotes in context?
His first inaugural address could have been uttered by Reagan, Goldwater, or Paul. It certainly could never have come believably from Obama or Clinton:
Thanks K
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“Poor Thomas Jefferson spent a great deal of effort and political capital proving he wasn’t a closet democrat.”
That’s way wrong. He belonged to the Democratic-Republican party. The other party at the time was the Federalist party.
Yes, one of the reasons he called his party that was to clarify that he was, in truth, republican, and any association of his philosophy with “democracy” was through the lens of the limited constitutional republic.
In fact, members of his party tended to refer to themselves as Republicans, while the opposing Federalists tended to refer to them as Democrats, or Democratic Republicans, or even as Jacobins, associating them with the democrats of the French Revolution.