28 September 2016
By Jacob G. Hornberger
One of the most fascinating aspects of the 2016 presidential race is the large
number of people who continue to ask, ''How is it possible that in a nation of
300 million people, we ended up with two horrendous presidential candidates
like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump?''
There is an explanation for this phenomenon but it's one that all too many
people just don't want to think about. The explanation was provided by Nobel
Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek in Chapter 10 of his book The Road to
Serfdom. The chapter is entitled ''Why the Worst Get on Top.''
Hayek explained that under a dictatorial type of government, the worst people
are inevitably going to be the ones who rise to the top, owing to the very
nature of the system. He writes:
There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst
features of existing totalitarian systems are not accidental byproducts, but
phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce. Just as
the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be
confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or
abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose
between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that
the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society
tending toward totalitarianism.
What people who lament that we've ended up with Trump and Clinton just don't
get is that Clinton and Trump are the logical outcome of the welfare-warfare
state system that modern-day Americans have chosen to embrace, a system that
encompasses the wielding and exercise of totalitarian powers. This is
reflected by people's continued steadfast allegiance to the welfare-warfare
state apparatus and their unwavering hope that it will someday produce good
presidential candidates.
It isn't going to happen. It's a pipedream. As long as America continues to
embrace a bad system — one that orients toward totalitarianism, Clinton and
Trump and others of their ilk will be the ones who get on top.
From the first grade in the public (i.e., government) schools to which
American parents are required by law to send their children, students are
inculcated with the notion that Americans are a free people, especially by
virtue of the fact that the federal government is a democratic one.
Yet democracy has nothing to do with freedom. As 18th- and 19th-century
Americans understood, democracy is an enormous threat to freedom. That's why
the word democracy is not even mentioned in the Constitution. It's also why
the Bill of Rights protects American society from democracy.
Freedom? Oh sure, Americans have been indoctrinated into believing they're
free. But the reality is that Americans epitomize the people described by
Goethe when he pointed out that ''None are more hopelessly enslaved than those
who falsely believe they are free.''
Americans live under a government that wields the omnipotent power to
assassinate them any time it wants. No due process. No trial by jury. No
federal court interference. No congressional interference. No wrongful death
actions. All that any president has to do is order his troops or his CIA
agents to label an American a terrorist and kill him. The hit can take place
when an American is traveling or living abroad or even here in the United
States. In the war on terrorism, the entire world is the battlefield and every
American is a potential terrorist. Just ask the family of Anwar al-Awlaki and
his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, both of whom were assassinated by U.S.
military or para-military forces.
Americans live under a government that wields the omnipotent power to arrest
them, put them into a military dungeon or concentration camp for the rest of
their lives, and torture them. No due process. No trial by jury. Just raw,
unrestrained power over every citizen. Just ask the families of
Japanese-Americans. Or just ask Jose Padilla, the American citizen whose
military incarceration and torture on American soil was upheld by the federal
courts.
Americans live under a government that wields the omnipotent power to spy on
them, monitor their activities, read their mail and email, and listen to and
record their telephone conversations. Even if some of the activity is
considered illegal, everyone knows that nothing is ever going to happen to any
federal agent who engages in these activities so long as he did it in the good
faith belief that he was protecting ''national security.'' Every American now
lives under the prospect that the government knows about the most private and
confidential parts of his life, and he inevitably acts accordingly.
On the warfare state side of things, the national-security branch of the
government — i.e., the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA — operate in secret and
oftentimes lie about what they are doing, in the name of ''national
security.''
On the welfare state side of things, the government wields the omnipotent
power to take whatever percentage of people's income it wants and give it to
other people. The IRS, which enforces the federal income tax, is one of the
most tyrannical and feared agencies in history. Sometimes public officials are
nice and keep the percentage relatively low. Sometimes they're not so nice and
set it higher. But make no mistake about it: Public officials are the ones
setting the percentage. They are deciding how much people are going to be
permitted to keep, much as a parent determines an allowance for his children.
As a practical matter, the government spends as much as it wants. What happens
when expenditures exceed tax revenues? No problem. Public officials simply
borrow the difference, adding to the mountain of federal debt that hangs over
the nation like a Damocles sword. To pay off the debt in debased dollars, the
Federal Reserve, an agency of unelected bureaucrats, wields the omnipotent
authority to inflate (and destroy) the currency to any extent it wants.
In the drug war, federal officials jail people, oftentimes for decades, for
doing nothing more than possessing or distributing drugs that public officials
say are harmful.
None of this is consistent with a free society. It is all consistent with
totalitarianism, including regimes whose officials are democratically elected.
The test for a free society is not how officials get into power but rather
with the nature of the powers they wield over the citizenry.
Many of those who lament that Clinton and Trump have risen to the top don't
want to change their welfare-warfare state system. Instead, they just want
better candidates. They fail to realize that Clinton and Trump and others like
them come with the welfare-warfare system they favor. They fail to see that
the only way to get better candidates is with a system based on individual
liberty, free markets, and a limited-government republic, which necessarily
entails a dismantling of the welfare-warfare state, not a reform of it.
When people are living under a government that wields totalitarian-like
powers, it is in their interests to have nice people wielding such powers. At
the risk of belaboring the obvious, if people have to live under a
dictatorship, including a democratically elected one, they're better off with
a nice dictator rather than a nasty one. Hayek writes:
No doubt an English ''fascist'' system would greatly differ from the Italian
or German models; no doubt if the transition were effected without violence,
we might expect to get a better type of leader. And if I had to live under a
fascist system I have no doubt that I would rather live under one run by
Englishmen than under one run by anybody else. Yet all this does not mean
that, judged on our present standards, a British fascist system would in the
end prove so very different or much less intolerable than its prototypes.
The big problem facing the American people in the 2016 presidential race is
that both of their presidential candidates are not very nice people. In fact,
they are both very nasty, vicious people. That's really what's creating
anxiety for Americans. Having brought into existence a government with
dictatorial powers over them, it is dawning on them that, either way, they are
about to end up with a very nasty, vicious person wielding those dictatorial
powers over them.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
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