friedrich hayek the constitution of liberty

Any group left behind and powerful enough will, in turn, ask for compensating favors.Īn unlimited democratic government is thus constantly blackmailed and corrupted by special interests.

Given their own interests in winning elections, political parties become mere “coalitions of organized interests,” horse-trading favors and privileges for their respective electoral clientèles.

The cause is that a government with unlimited powers “cannot refuse to exercise them,” so everybody will rush to the public trough.Īs we know from Mancur Olson, 3 the most concentrated interests, which are more efficient at organizing to lobby governments, will usually win the competition in the tilted political field. The current, unlimited democracy leads to rent-seeking (competition for government privileges), the triumph of special interest groups, and legal corruption. It is an error to view democracy not as “a procedure for arriving at agreement on common action,” but instead “to give it a substantive content prescribing what the aim of those activities ought to be.” Democracy was a protection against tyranny. Liberal democracy originally referred simply to “a method of procedure for determining government decisions” or, more practically, for getting rid of governments without bloodshed. Unlimited democratic power can be traced back to the decline of Athenian democracy at the end of the 5th century BC when, as Aristotle noticed, “the emancipated people became a tyrant.” In a similar way, the British Parliament became sovereign, that is, theoretically omnipotent, in 1766, when it “explicitly rejected the idea that in its particular decisions it was bound to observe any general rules not of its own making.” The first broad argument of the book is that democracy has diverged from its original ideal and degenerated into an unlimited and totalitarian democracy. Unlimited Democracy, Totalitarian Democracy

Friedrich hayek the constitution of liberty