Democracy: The God That Failed

An Essay on Hans-Hermann Hoppe and the Case Against Democratic Government

The Numbers

For several hundred years, the tax burden on European populations rarely exceeded 5 to 8 percent of national income. Economic historian Carlo M. Cipolla, surveying the entire period from the eleventh century onward, concluded that apart from particular times and places, the public power never managed to draw more than this share.¹ Even by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, with voting rights already expanding across the continent, total government expenditure in most Western European countries had not risen above 10 percent of GDP, and only rarely — as in Germany — exceeded 15 percent.²

By the 1920s and 1930s, it stood at 20 to 30 percent. By the mid-1970s, roughly 50 percent.³

Government employment tracks the same curve. Until the late nineteenth century, it rarely exceeded 3 percent of the labour force. Royal ministers and parliamentarians were not paid from the public purse — they supported themselves from private incomes. By the mid-1970s, government employment across Western Europe had reached approximately 15 percent — and that figure systematically excludes military personnel, hospital staff, welfare institution employees, social insurance agencies, and nationalised industries.⁴

These are not contested numbers. They come from Peter Flora’s State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe 1815–1975, the standard reference dataset for European fiscal and administrative history.⁵

The question is what changed. The conventional answer is two world wars, industrialisation, and the growing complexity of modern economies. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), offers a structurally different explanation. What changed was the form of government itself — and the transition from monarchy to democracy removed constraints on state power that had held for centuries.

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The Owner and the Caretaker

The argument begins with an observation so elementary it is surprising how rarely it appears in political theory. Hoppe applies the economist’s distinction between private and public ownership to the institution of government itself.

A monarch owns the government the way a landlord owns an estate. He can pass it to his heirs. He profits from its long-term capital value. A democratic leader is a temporary caretaker. He holds office for a fixed term, cannot sell government assets, cannot pocket the proceeds, and cannot bequeath his position to his children. He owns the current use of government resources, but not their capital value.⁶

From this single distinction, a series of predictions follows — each deduced from the incentive structure, not from historical observation.

A private owner has reason to preserve what he owns. He will tax moderately, because overtaxation reduces the productive capacity of his realm and therefore its long-term value. A caretaker faces the opposite incentive. What he does not extract during his tenure, he may never extract at all. Even if he wished to act differently, he could not, because as public property government resources are unsaleable, and without market prices economic calculation is impossible. Moderation offers the democratic leader only disadvantages.⁷

A monarch will avoid excessive debt, because he and his dynasty bear the consequences. A democratic caretaker can pile up obligations that will be repaid by future officeholders — or more precisely, by future taxpayers. The debts are not his.

A monarch will generally refrain from redistributing income within civil society, because redistribution between groups lowers overall productivity and therefore the value of his realm. A democratic leader depends on redistribution for survival. He must reward the constituencies that elected him, which means transferring wealth from those who did not vote for him to those who did. Every election cycle accelerates this logic.

And a monarch has a means of territorial expansion unavailable to democratic leaders: marriage. The Habsburg empire is the textbook example. Maximilian I married Mary of Burgundy and inherited the Netherlands. Their son Philip married Joanna of Castile and acquired Spain. Their grandson Charles became ruler of Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, and the American possessions — through contracts, not conquest.⁸ Democratic leaders, who cannot marry their children into ruling dynasties, have only one path to expansion: war.

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The Hinge of History

The significance of World War I in Hoppe’s framework is that it marks the moment of transition. Before 1914, the world was overwhelmingly monarchical. Only France and Switzerland were republics. Only Britain could be described as a parliamentary monarchy where real power rested with Parliament rather than with the Crown.⁹

The war — driven in large part by Woodrow Wilson’s ideological conviction that the world must be made safe for democracy — destroyed the old order in the space of four years. The Romanovs were ousted in Russia. The Hohenzollerns abdicated in Germany. The Habsburgs fell in Austria. Every newly created successor state — Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia — adopted a democratic-republican constitution. In Turkey and Greece, the monarchies were overthrown. Even where monarchies nominally survived, as in Britain, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries, all governmental power was transferred to parliaments and elected officials. Universal adult suffrage, male and female, became standard virtually everywhere.¹⁰

A new political form became universal, in historical terms overnight. What followed can be measured.

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Money

The monetary data is where the contrast becomes most vivid.

Under the monarchical order, the world operated on commodity money — typically gold or silver. Kings tried to debase their currencies through coin-clipping, and they periodically attempted to introduce paper money. The Bank of England, from its founding in 1694, suspended gold payments in 1696, 1720, 1745, and from 1797 to 1821. But these experiments remained regional and short-lived. The Dutch Tulip Mania collapsed in 1637. The Mississippi Bubble and the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720. John Law, the early theorist of fiat money whose experiment in France ran from 1711 to 1720, fled the country in secret after it collapsed and died impoverished and forgotten in Venice.¹¹

No monarch succeeded in establishing a permanent monopoly on irredeemable paper currency. No single individual, not even a king, could be trusted with such a monopoly.¹²

It was only under democratic republicanism — under anonymous, impersonal rule — that pure fiat currency became possible. During World War I, belligerent governments left the gold standard, as governments had done during previous wars. Unlike every previous war, this one did not conclude with a return to gold. Instead, from the mid-1920s until 1971, a pseudo gold standard operated: only the United States redeemed dollars in gold (and from 1933, only to foreign central banks). Britain redeemed pounds in dollars. Everyone else redeemed their currencies in dollars or pounds. This arrangement limped along through a series of monetary crises until 1971, when even the last thread connecting money to gold was severed.¹³ For the first time in recorded history, the entire world operated on pure government paper money.

The consequences are legible in the price data. Under the British gold standard, prices fell continuously from 1660 to 1760. They fell again from 1760 to 1860. From 1860 to 1910, the wholesale price index dropped from 100 to 80.¹⁴ Money became worth more over time.

Under the democratic-republican monetary regime, the U.S. wholesale commodity price index stood at 113 in 1921. By 1948 it had reached 185. By 1971, 255. By 1981, 658. By 1991, it was approaching 1,000.¹⁵

The money supply tells the same story from behind the curtain. From 1845 to 1918 — more than seventy years under a commodity standard — the British money supply increased approximately sixfold.¹⁶ From 1918 to 1991 — seventy-three years under democratic monetary management — the U.S. money supply increased more than sixty-four-fold.¹⁷

Hoppe notes an irony that captures the shift precisely. John Law died in disgrace for his monetary experiments. John Maynard Keynes, who bore comparable responsibility for demolishing the classical gold standard in the twentieth century and whose Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1971, was honoured throughout his lifetime and remains celebrated as one of history’s great economists. Keynes’s personal philosophy — summarised in his famous dictum that “in the long run we are all dead” — sums up the spirit of the democratic age.¹⁸

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Debt

Under monarchical rule, government debts were war debts. They accumulated during conflicts and were reduced during peace. The British record is representative: government debt rose through the eighteenth-century wars — 76 million pounds after the Spanish War in 1748, 127 million after the Seven Years’ War, 232 million after the American War of Independence, 900 million after the Napoleonic Wars. But between each war, total debt actually decreased. From 1815 to 1914 — a full century — British national debt fell from 900 million to below 700 million pounds.¹⁹

Under democratic government, debt increases in wartime and in peacetime. There is no period when it does not grow. British debt stood at 7.9 billion pounds in 1920, 8.3 billion in 1938, 22.4 billion in 1945, 34 billion in 1970, and above 190 billion by 1987. U.S. federal debt was 25 billion after World War I, 43 billion in 1940, 270 billion after World War II, and approximately 6 trillion by the time Hoppe wrote.²⁰

A structural inversion accompanied this growth. Kings paid higher interest rates on their borrowing than private commercial borrowers. Lenders understood the risk of lending to a ruler who might default.²¹ Under democratic government, the relationship flips. Government debt sells at below-market rates, because democratic governments can monetise their debts — they create new money to pay their creditors, turning deficit financing into what Hoppe calls a mere banking technicality.²²

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Interest Rates and Time Preference

Interest rates reveal something deeper than fiscal policy. They measure what economists call time preference — the degree to which a society values present consumption over future provision. Low time preference produces saving, investment, durable institutions, and long planning horizons. High time preference produces consumption, short-termism, and neglect of the future.

The secular trend of interest rates across recorded history was downward. From Classical Greece, where rates ran 16 to 18 percent, they fell irregularly but persistently. By 1900, minimum long-term interest rates across European countries had dropped well below 3 percent.²³ This was the observable signature of civilisational advance: an ever-widening horizon of provision and care.

That trend reversed in the twentieth century. Despite dramatically higher real incomes — which should, all else being equal, push interest rates lower — twentieth-century rates have consistently exceeded nineteenth-century rates. Even after adjusting for the inflation premium built into post-1970s nominal rates, real interest rates appear to sit around 4 to 5 percent — at approximately the level of fifteenth-century Europe.²⁴

U.S. savings rates of around 5 percent of disposable income match those of seventeenth-century England, when people were incomparably poorer.²⁵ The wealth is there. The orientation toward the future is not.

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War

Hoppe’s treatment of warfare is where the argument becomes hardest to dismiss, because the contrast is so stark and so well documented.

Warfare under the monarchical order was limited by structure. Wars arose from inheritance disputes — dynasties died out, rival claimants emerged, and conflicts followed over specific territories. Because they were property disputes, they had defined objectives and endpoints. The civilian population was largely uninvolved. Armies were small, professional, expensive to train, and therefore too valuable to waste. Generals avoided pitched battles when possible. A campaign won through manoeuvre, without significant casualties, was considered the crowning achievement of the military art.²⁶

The military historian Michael Howard noted that in the eighteenth century, commerce, travel, and cultural intercourse went on in wartime almost unhindered. Wars were the king’s wars. The citizen’s role was to pay his taxes, and sound political economy dictated that he should be left alone to make the money from which to pay them.²⁷

Guglielmo Ferrero described eighteenth-century warfare as a system governed by precise rules, where war was regarded as a kind of single combat between two armies, with the civil population merely as spectators. Pillage and violence against civilians were forbidden — in one’s own country and in the enemy’s. Because soldiers were scarce and costly, commanders tried to avoid battle altogether. War became a game between sovereigns, with its rules and its stakes — a territory, an inheritance, a throne, a treaty.²⁸

J.F.C. Fuller traced the transformation to the French Revolution. When armies became instruments of the people rather than of the king, they grew in size and in ferocity. National armies fight nations; royal armies fight their like. The first obey a mob, always demented; the second, a king, generally sane. Conscription, decreed by the French Republic in 1793, changed the basis of warfare entirely. Soldiers had been costly; now they were cheap. Battles had been avoided; now they were sought. Within 150 years, Fuller observed, conscription had led the world back to tribal barbarism.²⁹

William Orton summarised what the twentieth century destroyed: nineteenth-century wars were kept within bounds by the tradition, recognised in international law, that civilian property and business stood outside the sphere of combat. Twentieth-century practice abolished all of it. The concept of neutrality was denounced. Every sort of commerce was put in jeopardy. Total war became a condition that no civilian community could hope to escape.³⁰

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Welfare and the Destruction of the Family

The welfare state is the domestic expression of the same underlying dynamic.

Under monarchies, more than 50 percent of government spending — which was itself only about 5 percent of national product — went to the military. The remainder covered government administration. Welfare spending played almost no role. Insurance was a matter of individual responsibility. Poverty relief was left to voluntary charity.³¹

Under democratic government, military spending has risen to 5–10 percent of national product. But with government now consuming half of national output, military spending represents only 10–20 percent of total government expenditure. The majority — typically more than 50 percent of all government spending, or about 25 percent of the entire national product — goes to welfare: compulsory government insurance against illness, injury, old age, unemployment, and an ever-lengthening list of conditions.³²

The effects cascade through the institutions that had previously performed these functions. When the state assumes responsibility for health, old age, and misfortune, the value of marriage, family, and children — the older system of mutual insurance — declines accordingly.

For centuries, European birth rates held between 30 and 40 per thousand population, somewhat higher in Catholic countries, somewhat lower in Protestant ones. During the twentieth century, birth rates across Europe and the United States fell to 15 to 20 per thousand — roughly halved. Divorce, illegitimacy, single parenthood, singledom, and abortion all rose in parallel. Savings rates stagnated or fell despite rising incomes.³³

These are not merely cultural shifts. They are predictable responses to an incentive structure that systematically devalues the family as an institution of long-term provision.

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Crime

Throughout the nineteenth century, crime rates in Western countries fell steadily. An initial spike during the early decades of urbanisation was absorbed and reversed — and the downward trend continued even as rapid urbanisation persisted for another century. When crime rates began their systematic upward movement in the mid-twentieth century, urbanisation had actually slowed.³⁴

Hoppe attributes the reversal to two features of democratic governance: the flood of legislation, which erodes clarity about what is and is not legitimate behaviour, and the welfare state, which reduces the personal cost of irresponsible conduct. High time preference is not equivalent to criminality — it also expresses itself in recklessness, unreliability, laziness, and hedonism. But there is a structural relationship. Earning a market income requires patience, planning, and deferred gratification. Most serious criminal activities — murder, assault, robbery, theft — require none. The reward is immediate; the punishment lies in the future and is uncertain. When a society’s overall orientation shifts toward the present, the frequency of these crimes rises accordingly.³⁵

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The Vanishing Distinction

There is an obvious objection to all of this. Many things changed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — industrialisation, urbanisation, technology, two global wars. Any of these could account for the trends Hoppe identifies.

His framework addresses the objection in two ways. The first is theoretical. He is not simply observing correlations and guessing at causes. He derives specific predictions from the incentive structures inherent in private versus public ownership of government — taxation will rise, sound money will be destroyed, debt will become permanent, wars will become total, welfare will expand, family structures will deteriorate, crime will increase — and then tests each prediction against the historical record. Every one is confirmed.

The second is a mechanism that explains why democratic government specifically weakens resistance to state growth. Under monarchy, the distinction between rulers and ruled is stark. Everyone knows who the king is and who is not. A clear class consciousness develops among the ruled — an instinctive solidarity against the expansion of state power. Bertrand de Jouvenel made the same observation: under the ancien régime, those who had no chance of sharing in power were quick to denounce its smallest encroachment.³⁶

Democracy dissolves this resistance. When anyone can become president, the line between ruler and ruled blurs. The illusion arises that nobody is ruled at all — that everyone rules himself. Nobody is concerned to cut down an office to which he might one day aspire, or to put sand in a machine he hopes to operate when his turn comes. Taxation and regulation that once appeared plainly oppressive seem far less so once anyone can, in theory, join the ranks of those doing the taxing.³⁷

This is the mechanism. Not a conspiracy. Not coordinated malice. A structural property of the institution, operating regardless of any individual politician’s intentions.

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The Dissolution of Law

One further dimension deserves attention, because it bears on how property rights — the foundation of civilisation in Hoppe’s framework — have been systematically hollowed out.

Under the monarchical order, law was understood as something to be discovered and applied, not invented. Kings functioned as judges, not legislators. They accepted the preexisting body of private property law and were themselves bound by it. As late as the early twentieth century, the British legal scholar Albert V. Dicey could maintain that in Great Britain, public or administrative law — as distinct from private law — did not exist. Government agents were regarded as bound by the same rules and subject to the same laws as any private citizen.³⁸

After World War I, under democratic republicanism, public agents achieved immunity from the provisions of private law. The socialist legal theorist Gustav Radbruch articulated the new view: private law was to be regarded as merely a provisional and constantly decreasing range of private initiative, temporarily spared within the all-comprehensive sphere of public law.³⁹ The inversion was complete. Law had been a constraint on power. Now law was an instrument of power. What had been a body of universal, immutable principles became a flood of legislation — tens of thousands of new rules every year, creating what Hoppe describes as legal inflation to match the monetary kind.

Jouvenel captured the endpoint with precision: nowadays it is understood that our subjective rights are precarious and at the good pleasure of authority.⁴⁰

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The Exit

Hoppe is explicit that a return to monarchy is neither possible nor desirable. The legitimacy of monarchical rule has been irretrievably lost, and monarchy itself was never the solution — it was merely a form of government whose structural incentives happened to produce more moderate outcomes than the form that replaced it. Monarchies, too, exploit. They merely exploit less.

His proposal is more radical than restoration. The idea of democratic-republican rule must be rendered intellectually untenable — as laughable as the idea of monarchical rule is today. Not by replacing it with another form of government, but by recognising that government itself, in any form, is not the source of human civilisation. Private property is. The recognition and defence of private property rights, contractualism, and individual responsibility are what produce civilisation. Government, whether monarchical or democratic, parasitically draws on the wealth that private property creates. Democratic government draws on it faster, more aggressively, and with less resistance than any previous form.⁴¹

The strategic path is decentralisation. Secession. A systematic reversal of the political centralisation that has characterised the Western world for centuries. A territorially smaller government has more competitors, faces the constant threat of emigration, and must therefore restrain itself or lose its productive population to neighbours. At the limit — a world of tens of thousands of independent territories, regions, cantons, city-states, and free cities such as the present-day oddities of Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Hong Kong, and Singapore — competitive pressure would impose discipline that no single large government can replicate.⁴²

Only in small communities, Hoppe argues, can natural elites emerge: individuals whose economic independence, professional achievement, and moral conduct earn them voluntary authority — recognised authority, freely acknowledged, of the kind that can sustain a system of competing judges and overlapping jurisdictions. A private law society. Not monarchy. Not democracy. Something that has never fully existed, but whose elements can be seen in the remnants of decentralised order that persist even now, in the arena of international trade and travel, wherever private arbitration and voluntary cooperation operate outside the reach of the state.⁴³

Whether this is utopian or practical is one question. Whether the diagnosis is accurate is another. The data on taxation, money, debt, interest rates, welfare, family disintegration, crime, and war all changed at the same historical moment. They all moved in the same direction. And they all moved in the direction the theory predicts.

The conventional story of the twentieth century is that democracy liberated humanity from the tyranny of kings and ushered in an age of progress. Hoppe does not dispute the liberation. He disputes the progress.

The numbers are publicly available. They say what they say.

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References

¹ Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980), p. 48.

² Peter Flora, State, Economy, and Society in Western Europe 1815–1975: A Data Handbook (London: Macmillan, 1983), vol. 1, chap. 8. See also Flora, pp. 258–59 on the introduction of income tax: the United Kingdom from 1843, France from 1873, Italy 1877, Norway 1892, the Netherlands 1894, Austria 1898, Sweden 1903, the U.S. 1913, Switzerland 1916, Germany 1924.

³ Flora, State, Economy, and Society, chap. 8.

⁴ Flora, State, Economy, and Society, chap. 5. Government employment figures by country: Austria rose from less than 3 percent of the labour force in 1900 to almost 15 percent by the mid-1970s; France from 3 percent to about 15 percent; Germany from 5 percent to close to 15 percent; the United Kingdom from less than 3 percent to close to 15 percent.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), chap. 1.

⁷ Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1. On the impossibility of economic calculation under public ownership, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar’s Edition (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998).

⁸ Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1.

⁹ Ibid., Introduction.

¹⁰ Ibid. The successor states created after World War I: Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia all adopted democratic-republican constitutions, with Yugoslavia the sole exception.

¹¹ Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid. See also Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1990); Henry Hazlitt, From Bretton Woods to World Inflation (Chicago: Regnery, 1984).

¹⁴ B.R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 468ff.

¹⁵ Economic Report of the President (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992). 1930 = 100 for pre-WWII figures; 1983 = 100 for later figures. See also Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman, The Case for Gold: A Minority Report to the U.S. Gold Commission (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1982), p. 165f.

¹⁶ Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, p. 444f.

¹⁷ Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 704–22; and Economic Report of the President, 1992.

¹⁸ Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1, footnotes. See also Joseph T. Salerno, “Two Traditions in Modern Monetary Theory: John Law and A.R.J. Turgot,” Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 2, no. 2/3 (1991).

¹⁹ Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla, A History of Interest Rates (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 188 and 437.

²⁰ Jonathan Hughes, American Economic History (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1990), pp. 432, 498, and 589. See also Homer and Sylla, A History of Interest Rates.

²¹ Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 96. See also Homer and Sylla, pp. 5, 99, 106, 113f.

²² Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1. See also Murray N. Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking (New York: Richardson and Snyder, 1983), chap. 11.

²³ Homer and Sylla, A History of Interest Rates, pp. 553–58.

²⁴ Ibid., pp. 554–55.

²⁵ Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, p. 39. Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1.

²⁶ Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1.

²⁷ Michael Howard, War in European History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), chap. 4.

²⁸ Guglielmo Ferrero, Peace and War (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 5–7. See also J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of War (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), pp. 20–25.

²⁹ J.F.C. Fuller, War and Western Civilization (London: Duckworth, 1932), pp. 26–27; The Conduct of War, pp. 33, 35.

³⁰ William A. Orton, The Liberal Tradition: A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1969), pp. 251–52.

³¹ Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, pp. 54–55. Flora, State, Economy, and Society, chap. 8.

³² Flora, State, Economy, and Society, chap. 8, p. 454.

³³ B.R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics 1750–1970 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 16ff. See also Allan C. Carlson, Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crises (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1988).

³⁴ James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).

³⁵ Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1.

³⁶ Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of its Growth (New York: Viking, 1949), pp. 9–10.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Albert V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1903). See also Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), vol. 1, chaps. 4 and 6; Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1961).

³⁹ Gustav Radbruch, Der Mensch im Recht (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1957), p. 40.

⁴⁰ Bertrand de Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 189.

⁴¹ Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 1, conclusion.

⁴² Hoppe, Democracy, chap. 5.

⁴³ Ibid.