 I've been asked to speak a little bit about democracy and specifically I think we're witnessing something going on where the issue of democracy is being revealed as something that nobody really knows what they mean by it and that some groups have one idea of what democracy means, some groups have another idea, you might have an election and then one group that professes to be pro-democracy says well that's not really democracy because it didn't turn out the way we hoped it would. Or we're afraid that the game has been rigged and so however this democratic contest comes out we're going to be suspicious of the results or we're not going to believe that those results really reflect what actually happened. So there's all these conflicting views now about the legitimacy of elections, what does democracy mean, who gets to vote, who controls the outcome, can we sue to change the results, all of these sort of things have become much more, have been brought more to the fore in recent years and there's specific reasons for that. But let's just look at some of the examples and then once we look at the different ways that democracy is being challenged and being kind of mixed up in how people view it, look at some of the ways that we could really change how democracy affects our lives without getting rid of it because I don't, and I'm not saying we shouldn't get rid of it but I'm saying is it's not going anywhere and that if you ask people, do you like democracy? Is that a good thing? Overwhelming number of people will say yes and then if you ask them next, okay what does democracy mean exactly whether they have no idea. And then of course some people try to get off the hook by saying well I'm in favor of republics not democracy so ask them what does the republic mean, they have no idea. So what I think what we need to do is look then at really how do you use democracy, what is its proper role in society when you're stuck with it, when you got it, when everybody wants it. What are the underlying conditions that make democracy work reasonably well and what are the conditions that make it a disaster? Mises had a lot of thoughts on these and we'll look at some of those. But first of all let's look at one side of one group of people who have been attacking there as they see it to democracy in recent years and months and that's coming from the elites that is the wealthy, the powerful, they've been having some problems with democracy lately. Their problem is that there's been too many of these referendums, there's been too many of these initiatives, there's been too many votes from the ordinary people who have been approving things we don't particularly favor. Examples of course are Brexit is probably the most high profile, biggest example of that. And so immediately after the Brexit vote took place, of course, then we started to hear about well it's non-binding, we really should have parliament vote on it, it was all just a bunch of crazy hicks who voted yes and so on. And maybe we should have some, let's sue, maybe the courts can really give us some guidance here. The idea was immediately to act as though the majority vote in that case was not valid, should not be adhered to. This is of course the opposite of what we often hear from the wealthy elites, who when democracy goes their way tell us how important it is, we should always respect the will of the majority and so on. And other examples of course also are there was a Hungarian vote on immigration quotas on how many bills should be allowed to migrate to Hungary, well that was that passed overwhelmingly that there should be in fact limits. Of course it was immediately pointed out well only a certain percentage of the population voted on that. Of course don't expect to hear that same argument if only a certain population of Americans vote in this presidential election, which of course will be the case. And other examples include a recent vote in Columbia where there was a peace deal worked out by the government there and then they had a referendum on whether that peace deal would be accepted by the population overall and they voted it down. And then what that immediately led to just days later were articles in the New York Times and other similar organizations saying well this whole referendum thing is not really democratic. We really need to rethink all of this stuff where we're allowing people to vote on laws directly. Really what we need is to is to let the more reasonable people in the legislators, in the legislatures, the more educated people really determine what's best for us and really get rid of all this direct democracy stuff. Now maybe that's a good argument but it's certainly not the argument they've been making for decades, which is that we need more democracy, we need more voting, the outcomes of those, they reveal what the general will is. And what they really want of course, which was quoted in the New York Times article, was this as noted and so I'm quoting, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and US diplomat George Kennan argued that foreign affairs should be in the realm of the quote, prophetic minority who understood what was in the best interests of citizens. And now of course it's especially important in foreign affairs because the common people they don't know about those important things. But this of course is extended to everything as well. We need the courts, we need the legislatures to really be able to veto these things. And that's what we saw of course out in the result of the Brexit vote. I have Brexit vote against it. Maybe we can have the Scottish Parliament veto Brexit somehow. Surely there's a way to overcome the way that these people have voted. But then of course when the legislature does something in a similar way that the elites don't like, well then we don't want the parliament voting on things. A perfect example of that would be the impeachment of the president in Brazil where Dilma Rousseff was impeached by the legislature there, the democratically elected legislature. So what you had was the people voted on Rousseff. They voted her into office two years earlier and then the legislature come back, itself democratically elected, decided to impeach her and threw her out of office. And then we were treated to all kinds of articles from the New York Times and so on saying, well this isn't a front to democracy. This isn't democracy because the people chose Rousseff and now we've got this legislature getting rid of her. Now of course in the Brexit case we need the legislature to do the right thing. But in the Brazil case the legislature did something. But that was wrong. So which is it? It apparently it's just whatever happens to fit the thinking of the New York Times and its friends. And then of course at the state level in the United States this happens all the time where the states will approve referenda and then if we don't like that enough then we just sue enough times until the federal courts overturn at a case in point would be the ban on gay marriage that California voted on approved that and then we just had the courts overturn that. And so there's always ways around it. But what isn't admitted of course is that nobody seems to be agreeing on what this democracy means. And so that has really been exposed more in recent days. We used to paper it over a lot more but now with so many high profile referenda and initiatives it's becoming more of an issue. Now at the same time you've got other groups that are attacking democracy from another angle and they become very concerned about it and they don't trust the elections and they see maybe the elections as not reflecting what they really think. And to look at this we get asked why are there so many referenda now so many high profile referenda so many initiatives well part of it is because people don't feel that the people in the legislatures that the executives are actually reflecting what their real views are they see that well all those people who are up in Congress or in the national legislature they have their own views and then we have our views and they're never going to bring our views to a vote so we're going to have to have a reference the only way we can make our voice heard. So you're starting to see this greater division then between what it is that the elected officials say and do and think and what it is that the rest of us say and do we cannot trust our elected officials to actually do things that we think are important. However another reason that there have been greater attacks from the side of the common people if you will is that they simply fear the outcomes of elections more as governments become more and more powerful then what that means is that the outcome of each election could possibly do you more harm if you have a weak government that doesn't do very much or it's decentralized and you have it's okay the feds might have one agenda but maybe at your state level you can have a different agenda and there can be some conflict there and maybe mitigate the problems as one central government becomes more and more powerful then you start to fear more and more what could happen with the next election and so once you fear the next election more well then suddenly the stakes are higher and maybe you start to get a little bit more suspicious about whether the outcomes are really there about whether this really reflects what actually happened if there's so much power at stake for the central government wouldn't it be in their best interest then to manipulate the outcome and so a powerful government simply breeds suspicion of the electoral process is the natural outcome now and of course when you live in a place where there are also lots of different conflicting political groups then you start to fear that one of those groups might become especially powerful and Mises looked at this he looked at how democracy really can't sustain itself in a situation where the state is strong enough to really favor one group one interest group over another and he looked at this in the context of immigration and in liberalism his book he talks about the case of Australia specifically and what he says is the present inhabitants of Australia fear that someday they could be reduced to a minority in their own country it cannot be denied that these fears are justified because of the enormous power that today stands at the command of the state a national minority must expect the worst from a majority of a different nationality as long as the state is granted the vast powers which it has today and which public opinion considers as its right the thought of having to live in a state in the hands of a opposing group is terrifying now he's talking about in his case in the 20s he was talking about large numbers of people from neighboring countries moving to Australia but as Mises knew you could apply this logic to any number of interest groups it's not just foreign nationals that who might take control of the government and impose laws on you the problem could be anything it could be looking at the vast scope of American history could be union groups it could be communists it could be Catholics or Protestants or Muslims or the Irish or any of these other groups that over the decades of American history we have feared would take control of of the levers of government now that of course never translated much in the U.S. into most cases violent uprising or truly hysterical fears why because people realized that the federal government was relatively weak and could not impose a lot of what might have been imposed if you know group X takes over however as Mises notes once you have a government that you truly fear if you have a president who rules with a pen and a phone as Obama said right we don't need Congress I don't need the courts I'll just pass laws unilaterally so now you're in a situation where whatever interest groups control that guy that's what you have to fear now so Misa said with the only reason that the only way you can overcome this problem of fearing these groups taking over would be to have a weaker government and Misa says it is clear that no solution to this problem is possible if one adheres to the idea of the interventionist state which metals in every field of human activity so if the government is empowered to meddle in every field of human activity well you better fear when someone else takes over because then they'll be able to do whatever they want so the answer of course is then to embrace a more lazy fair state and if you're stuck with democracy that's what you're going to get and of course even if you don't have elections if you find yourself in a minority situation you're going to be on the losing side of things even in an authoritarian state without elections so this issue of majorities oppressing minorities is always present but it is only mitigated then if you have a weaker state now moving on then let's look at some of the things that that must be done then in order to really change the role of democracy and really to to take a different look to expose some of the problems with what the current narrative is about democracy we've all seen that we can't agree with what it is and we've all seen that people fear the outcomes and that some elections are good some are bad we don't if things go against us well that's that's a miscarriage of democracy if they go our way it's fine but we really need to embrace some other ways of changing the whole way that we define it and view it and we don't even have to get rid of elections and we don't have to get again get rid of democracy this will really change the way that democracy works if we can do these three things there are other things we can do of course to like secession but let's just here's three that I'll propose change ideology that's a big thing is if you've got a if you've got a population that wants a certain type of government that's what you're going to get whether you have elections or not and Mises noted this he said that the Russian writing the 1920s the Russian conservative is undoubtedly correct when he points out that Russian czarism and the police of the czar was approved by the great mass of the Russian people so that even a democratic state could not have given Russia a different system of government there's this belief among many people who forward democracy that it somehow leads necessarily to liberal results liberalism being lazy fair government but of course liberal democracy can be used to forward any ideology and the agenda of any group and as Mises points out here it can be used to forward czarism if that's what most people want what matters is the ideological underpinnings of the society in general and what the people believe government should do so if you want government if you want democracy to lead to better outcomes you've got to convince people that they want better outcomes and as long as people are voting with the intent of empowering government to do xyz you're probably going to get xyz and even if you don't have elections you'll probably eventually get xyz and then the second thing we need to do is end the idea that the general will is is reflected in democracy and Mises wrote about this he said grave injury has been done to the concept of democracy by those who conceived of it as a limitless rule of the Volante general that is the general will there is really no essential difference between the unlimited power of the democratic state and the unlimited power of the autocrat now we hear about this all the time every time there's a an election we hear about well this is what the people wanted and and the president has a mandate and and now we know what direction to take the country in because we had this election but of course a lot of times it's just built on pure conjecture and I mean even if we just look at who voted and in what percentages it it means nothing at all to draw the conclusion that we now know what the general will is is completely nonsensical and we can just look at this in American history a lot of time we're told about these landslides about all these great victories that these politicians achieved when a lot of the time they didn't get a majority they just simply got a plurality of the votes so that the majority of the voters actually voted against whoever it won but whoever was declared the winner whether it be by the supreme court or by the county clerks will now we know what all the voters wanted and of course this is a huge field in political science is how are the how is the will of the voter translated into public policy well nobody knows and of course we can't assume that just five people in a room who voted for Hillary Clinton why did they vote for what did they want her to do could have five probably totally different answers and so this conjecture this idea that well this candidate one and now reflects the will of 300 million people is certainly one of the most nonsensical things we could possibly say in politics but let's let's just look at the idea of what is the general will well looking back at the 1980 election we see that Reagan won that with 50 percent of the popular vote so was was the general will then that Reagan can do whatever Reagan wanted to do that was just 50 percent of the voting population if we look of course at the percentage of the total population that voted for Reagan the number is 19 percent so fewer than one in five Americans voted for the winner in that case and now even if you take out children and all of that you still come up with about 30 percent of the general population so what that means is that about 70 percent of the of the you know working age people in their prime or about 80 percent of the people overall either didn't care enough to vote for Reagan or wanted somebody else and then of course in the huge blowout of 1984 we're told where and of course we've all seen the electoral college map where Mondale got Minnesota and the District of Columbia wow look at what a blowout victory on reality Reagan got 58 percent or 23 percent of the overall population that voted for him and that was of course the huge blow we've had in decades if we look at 1992 where Clinton won in the three-way race he managed to get a whopping 43 percent of the people who voted which translated to 17 percent of the population overall so that's that was the general will 17 percent of the population let us know exactly the direction that everything should go in so how that amounts to the general will i'm not quite sure and then on top of that of course we had three elections in a row where the the declared winner didn't win a majority at all they got a plurality at 92 96 and 2000 and then of course in 2000 Bush got 47 percent of the vote or 17 percent of everybody and Gore got 48 percent of the vote and slightly over 17 percent of everybody and well what was the general will in that case and so this this argument should simply be revealed as really just a matter of okay it's it's a legal fiction we've invented yep they managed to win 42 43 percent of the voter's approval but why should that translate into a particular set of laws being set in motion now i recognize that sure you want somebody in that position you want somebody to be president fine but why should it be why should we accept that whatever that guy wants as equivalent to what the voters on there's no reason but part of the reason that they get away with it is because people accept this idea and this brings us to our third thing we need to change about people's views of of elections is that once the election is over then we're also to just sit back and accept the winner and kind of do do what they want and that the time for complaining is over and there's not there's not going to be any more of that and this was revealed in an interesting discussion that took place in the color of springs daily just a just a few days ago and it was revealed in a comment subtly revealed in a comment that someone made when they were arguing against mail-in ballots now whatever you think of mail-in ballots this is an interesting thing he said he said by by stretching the voting period over a span of weeks mail ballots also raise the likelihood that voters will miss important information when they vote because late-breaking news about a candidate might come after they voted now i wondered is this person aware that late-breaking news can occur after election day and it seems not the reason of course that he says this is because he has bought into the idea that election day somehow sprinkles pixie dust on the population and that well now election day is over so late-breaking news doesn't matter now of course if hillary is arrested the day after the election well she's president too late and of course we don't have laws that actually cover that so i guess we'll just have the supreme court decide if kane becomes president at that point and of course it's a very good possibility that she'll be elected assuming she's elected with say 45 percent of the vote so great we got someone who got 45 percent of the vote and then we have supreme court decided the vp after she's elected but it's the day after the election so you voters too late can't do anything about it now and this is the philosophy that underlies the whole concept of election day and voting is that well we voted for this person and now you guys sit back for four years and do whatever just kind of let it all pass you by now as part of part of the the underlying issue of course what he's saying here also is that uh well what this what this is an argument is is that late breaking news might come after the election this is an argument actually for more frequent elections or for simply saying that well what happens on election days just just you should approach it with caution and continue to oppose the outcome but we're totally you know no opposing the outcome because we're Americans and the mantle of legitimacy is draped over the winner and so on when in reality what we need to be telling people about elections is well the election is really just the opening act in the future of politics is okay some groups you know oh look 18% of the people said this person should be president okay well now what's the next step the next step is to vehemently oppose whatever it is the new president does the next step is to constantly try to legitimize them the next step is to try and get them impeached the next step is to constantly sue the administration the next step is to get your members in congress to oppose this person every chance they get but you're not supposed to do that because democracy says this person is now president and they have the general will behind them so when election day is over just keep a few things in mind keep in mind that only a small percentage of people actually voted for this person that the fact that that voting that election day is coming gone doesn't mean anything doesn't mean you need to wait four years before any action is taken now you'll be told if you try to say nasty things about the new president that uh well this is just madness you can't impeach a person because the people voted for him yes you can't let the legislature impeach him because 18% of the population voted for them you'll hear what you heard in brazil which is that well you can't impeach because it's contrary to the will of the people and I have no doubt that that will happen but this whole idea needs to be overcome this idea that well ideology doesn't matter because democracy really tells us what's important you can't make arguments that are contrary to the general will that the whole idea of the general will is obviously nonsense and then this idea that we all have to shut up after election day but at the same time now is ripe now is the good time to start making these things because now nobody can seem to agree on what democracy is you've got the elites attacking it from one side you've got the common people attacking it from another and so really the whole issue is up in the air and so maybe maybe we can start to really start to bite into the issue of democracy and start getting people to really rethink what it really means is it something that dictates to us what we should think or should we really use it as an opportunity to talk about the nonsense of trying to act like people who vote somehow provide power to the state to do whatever it wants so thank you very much