The UK has voted to leave the EU. More precisely, a little over half of voters have voted to leave the EU. But the losing side is crying foul play. A petition to hold a new referendum has already gathered millions of signatures. It was only a majority of the people who bothered to vote, not a real majority, they complain. Well, that’s not how democracy works, unfortunately. You don’t get to change the definition of a qualifying majority after the fact. The young complain that their votes count the same as an ‘old person’ even though they have to live with the consequences longer than ‘my granny, who will die in the next couple of years’, as on upset youngster put it. What happened to ‘one man – one vote’? Not an appealing idea if you are in the minority? Then you want your vote to count double? Not how democracy works! The Scottish are upset also. They will not accept being dragged along with the majority of British voters out of the EU. Last time I checked that is not how democracy works either. You don’t get to choose if you want to get ‘dragged along’ with the majority. The majority rules. They dictate over the minority. Period. That’s one of the things that are wrong with democracy. But few of the complaining voices were pointing out the flaws of democracy before the referendum. Few of them would have been on the barricades complaining of the minority being ‘dragged along’ if the vote had been a close ‘Remain’.
Democracy is a deficient form of government, as Hans-Herman Hoppe convincingly demonstrates in ‘Democracy: The God that Failed’. We share the frustration with democracy expressed by the Remain camp, though we would be surprised if any of the complaining voices are basing their criticism on that exceptional book. We bemoan that the democratic process legitimises the tyranny of the majority. We think that the history of Western liberal democracies show that democracy is incompatible with limited government. A majority will always vote to lay a claim on the resources of a minority. We believe that democracy is not a stable form of government and bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
We who believe in freedom and limited government have essentially lost every election for a century. But we understand what democracy is and do not complain like spoiled children when results do not go our way. Time for the Remainers to grow up and face reality.