The Aristocratic Tradition of Liberty

After you read the essay "Liberalism in America" by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn you might want to put this, as a follow-up, into your mp3 player and hit play. It is a broad and interesting speech. He speaks about, among related things, Mises, the Austrian School, liberalism in Europe, monarchy and democracy, freedom, and why aristocrats, and their important connection to Catholicism, are born anarchists (or, as he put it, "a liberal run wild").

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So What Does Democracy Have To Do With Liberty?

Democracy, contrary to left-liberal and neoconservative propaganda, has nothing at all to do with freedom, liberty, the rights of man, or security. Spreading democracy, Wilsonian-style, neither has anything to do with "making the world safe."

Democratic majority opinion of the generally unthinking and mostly feeling masses who parrot the current ethos, obtained from the educational system and the mainstream media, does not make a wrong a right. Voting therefore has nothing to do with liberty or morality. Those things should never be put up for a vote.

Under democracy legislation increasingly replaces the law implied in private property. Law becomes something that is "made" versus something to be discovered. The tradition of common law [pdf], which due to its spontaneous nature was largely libertarian, has consequently evaporated.

Man's perception of law then becomes that it is a something that is artificial; that law and ethics is nothing but relativistic. State legislation might say that one activity or action is legal today but tomorrow it might say that it is illegal. How then can there by anything really right or wrong? The answer is that there cannot be.

From this, culturally speaking, nihilism and moral relativism takes over man's minds and hearts. Economically, legal uncertainty raises time preferences and diminishes capital investment. The importance of status and function lessens. As the number of State made laws develop, the number of State defined crimes increases. A process of decivilization must occur.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn has asked [pdf] the question: Wasn't it democracy that killed Socrates and the Son of God?

It is true that I am not a monarchist, but I'll take a classical and traditional Christian monarchy any day over democracy (or a republic, which really is a democracy just the same). In that monarchy is more inline with private ownership and the incentives thereof it is closer to a purely private property society. It couldn't be any worse than what we have today; in fact, I'll say it would be a lot better.

Imagine an old time dynasty regulating by compulsion where people can and cannot smoke tobacco! In contrast, it is easy to imagine a majority gang-mob dictating that question by the barrel of the gun. It has happened and is happening. Moreover, most in the mob do not even see the freedom crushing methods to their madness.

To quote Mr. Lew Rockwell in his essay "Why Hate Monarchs?":

So many people associate democracy with freedom and monarchy with tyranny that any attempt to revisit pre-democratic systems of government is regarded as evil. ... Sheer nonsense. Freedom was nurtured in Europe under the decentralized monarchies of feudalism, which served as the political basis of decentralized federalism in the US. Unlike our own presidents, who are experts in passing the buck, the monarch tends to take personal responsibility for the fate of his domain. Upending a personal tyranny is much easier because you know whom to blame and whom to overthrow. ... [H]istory suggests we often have less to fear from monarchs than we do from democratically elected tyrants...

And as Dr. Hans Hoppe says, democracy allows "for A and B to band together to rip of C, C and A in turn joining to rip off B, and then B and C conspiring against A, etc."

See: The Paleo Blog's "Are ---We--- the Government?", "Ideas, Consequences, and Libertarianism", "Freedom is the Answer --- Not Just a Return to the Constitution".