Democracy is a fraud, a cover for rule by private interests
Paul Craig Roberts
Political campaign contributions, not voters, elect the president and members of the Senate and House. Consequently, elected representatives represent the private interests that fund their campaigns.
Democracy serves as a cloak, a guise, that hides the fact that the government belongs to the private lobbies that purchased it.
In every election the emphasis is on getting the vote out, and that is done by money. There is no democracy as long as money determines election outcomes and thereby “public” policy. Obviously, there is no public policy serving the public’s interest.
Why do Americans believe in the hoax of democratic rule?
Why did the Supreme Court rule that it is a First Amendment right for organized lobbies to purchase the government?
In 1973 Alvin Rabushka and I had an article published in the journal, Public Choice, titled “A Diagrammatic Exposition of an Economic Theory of Imperialism.” In the article we introduced the concept of the “imperialist paradox.” The point we made is that whereas imperial rule is considered exploitative, in actual fact it extracts less resources than a democracy responding to organized interests. The reason is that the organized interests in democracies are shielded by the assumption that government is acting in the public’s interest, whereas an imperial regime is assumed to be acting in its interest. Imperial exploitation is recognized and resisted, whereas exploitation by organized interests in a democracy is protected under the rubric of serving the public interest.
Liberals maintain that government regulation restricts exploitation by private interests, but as economist George Stigler pointed out decades ago, regulatory agencies are captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate. We certainly witnessed that fact during the “Covid pandemic” when the FDA, CDC, and NIH served Big Pharma’s profits and not the public’s health.
Everywhere in the Western world there is movement away from government accountable to the people, which is what democracy is supposed to deliver. Indeed, the model for European progress is tyranny and not democracy. The European Union that has been constructed has a powerless elected parliament. The power is in the European Commission which is appointed.
The attack on democracy is seen everywhere in the West. For example, free speech is the bedrock of accountable government; yet free speech is under attack in every Western country as anti-semitic, racist, homophobic, offensive, and even terrorist. The liberal-left regards free speech as a hindrance to the woke agenda. People have forgot what they once understood: that their own governments are the greatest threat to their liberty.