Democracy Assures That Only Dangerous Men Will Rise to the Top of Government Since They Are Adept at Orchestrating the Rent-Seeking Game

In contrast, for the most part, democratic government involves a process of one group of citizens bribing legislators to attenuate the private property rights of others for no other reason than the first group wishes to (legally) steal the others’ property. It is the domain of rent-seeking behavior. The business of modern democracy is to attenuate property rights in order to fuel the special-interest, rent seeking machine. This is very much the opposite of voluntary, consensual, private property markets. Merely repeating over and over that “politics is like markets,” as Stigler, Wittman, and some other Chicago School scholars have done, does not make it so. The attenuation of property rights that is the defining characteristic of democracy weakens incentives to be productive while increasing the rewards of unproductive rent seeking.

One implication of this analysis is that the people who rise to the top in democratic governments are those who are adept at orchestrating the rent-seeking game. Indeed, years of experience at lower levels of office (city council, state legislature) is the usual prerequisite for higher office. As Hans Hermann Hoppe puts it, “democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of government.” Dangerous, in the sense that they are adept at destroying property by facilitating the plunder of rent seeking. As rent seeking becomes more pervasive in a democracy, more and more people will decide to try to become adept at it rather than becoming genuinely productive citizens. The proportion of parasites will rise relative to producers, which will cause national wealth to be lower than it would otherwise be.

--Thomas J. DiLorenzo and Walter E. Block, An Austro-Libertarian Critique of Public Choice, Economy and Society (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, 2016), Kindle e-book.