Free and popular government

A government is the more popular as it is the more democratic, the more immediately, thoroughly, and fully responsive to the will of the people.

So, the more popular as it is the more like an unlimited dictatorship of the whole people, assembled.

But a government is the more free as it is the less absolute, unchecked, and lawless.

As you see, the two are not the same.

In view of which we may say government is not necessarily less tyrannical, less despotic, or less oppressive for being more popular, though the identities of the tyrants and their victims may change.

But government is, necessarily, less tyrannical for being more free.

Hence the enormous importance of constitutionalism and lawful, constitutional government.

And hence the enormous imprudence, the enormous stupidity, and the enormous danger of the views of Louis Michael Seidman.

Points the more evident the more we consider not merely the ancient tyrannies but the far more devastating modern ones and, of those, the communist tyrannies.

Hobbes thought the greatest danger we face is the disorganized and sporadic violence of anarchy.

Our 20th Century proved him so very wrong.

The greatest threat, we know well, is Leviathan, the state itself.

On the other hand, a question both stupid and illuminating.

Supposing you were to be a nameless subject, which would you rather?

Be a subject of any Christian monarch of the 17th or 18th Centuries, the European Age of Absolutism, or be ruled by Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, or even Castro?

I, an atheist, an amoralist, and an egoist, say without question or hesitation, I choose the Christian King.

Of two governments, both absolute, one can be much worse than the other.

It is partly a matter of will.

And partly a matter of capacity.

And yet another note.

A government can be free, but not the bulwark of freedom for all those subject to it.

Slaves, clearly, are left outside the scope of the state's complete solicitude.

And the same is true of any who, propertyless themselves, are pressed needlessly by that legal creation and its legal enforcement into the bitterness of wage-slavery or, worse yet, into hopeless destitution or even death by poverty.

Hence a regime of freedom for all must exclude both the one and the other.

We must not forget that harm suffered for lack of property is inflicted by the government in its defense of property, and is thus the most grievous oppression if it is unnecessary.

It is, after all, the same rule that makes one rich that makes the others poor.

Hence provision for the propertyless many from the surplus of the few is essential not only to the domestic tranquility but to the freedom itself of any free state.