Who should make the decision about whether you can have a gas stove in your new house?
The libertarian answer is that it should be up to you.
What I might call the elitist answer is that the decision should be made by by experts, who decide either to forbid gas stoves or allow you to have one.
What I might call the democratic answer is that the decision of whether to forbid gas stoves should be put on the ballot, with all eligible voters participating. Or you could have pure pass-through representative democracy, in which elected representatives always make the decision that they know that constituents would vote for.
In practice in this country, democratic decisions are very rare. We don’t go with the democratic answer, and that is a good thing. As voters, we know far less than the unelected officials who make most of the decisions. If anything, we have too much representative democracy, in that Congressmen from Republican districts are afraid to vote for anything that Democrats support, and vice-versa.
We were never a democracy to begin with. At first, only free male landowners could vote, which was a small percentage of the population. Senators were chosen by state legislatures, until 1913 when the seventeenth amendment to the Constitution changed that to direct popular election. The Electoral College separated the Presidency from the popular vote—and many of the founders expected that Presidential elections would often be thrown in to the House of Representatives.
I strongly suspect that America’s founders preferred experts to the general public for making political decisions. But there were much fewer political decisions to be made, so that society was more libertarian.
Why has government grown? One answer is that society has become more interdependent, with a lot of potential sources of friction. If you were tending to your own farm, you were not constantly encountering other people whose behavior could matter to you.
Another answer is that there has been an increase in what I call Fear Of Others’ Liberty (FOOL). An example of acting like a FOOL is calling Child Protective Services if you spot a neighbor’s 8-year-old walking by himself.
Although ordinary people can be FOOLs, I believe that the bigger danger comes from elites behaving like FOOLs. Putting out regulations against gas stoves is an idea that originates with elites.
Politicians often compete for votes by stoking fear. Fear of being cheated in commerce. Fear of health problems. Fear of economic adversity. Fear of foreigners. Fear of terrorism.
In recent years, fear of others’ beliefs has become a big issue.1 People on the left fear Trump supporters. People on the right fear the Woke. Some of this increased fear probably comes from people spending more time on line, where people on your side are constantly bombarding you with outrageous stuff being said by people on the other side.
I believe that there are way too many FOOLs in government, especially in the bureaucracy. This is a difficult problem to address. Ordinary people do not have the time or the knowhow to do something about FOOLs in government. During election season, politicians usually have more incentive to cater to FOOLs rather than run on an anti-FOOL platform.
Genuine democracy would be bad, because people are ignorant FOOLs. But the current state is bad, because unelected officials are credentialed FOOLs. What libertarians hope for is elites who will take on the task of putting restrictions on the FOOLs. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were attempts at that. But from a libertarian perspective, those attempts failed to stem the tide.
These days, a lot of libertarians are looking at the DOGE to be the anti-FOOL. But DOGE has many FOEs (Fear Of Elon), and if it achieves any significant success I will be pleasantly surprised.
Historically, people feared others’ beliefs when it came to religion. Religious toleration was probably an important part of the American social fabric.
Democracy works well for simple things, like church pot lucks. Democracy is ill suited as a means of governance. The confusion is that democracy is very important for citizen involvement in a community, but we cannot have nor expect the citizenry to govern society.
A healthy society needs citizens who largely govern themselves. We want a community where the police and social workers are scarcely needed, because the people follow the law and take care of themselves and dependents and do so without coercion.
The less society expects the citizenry to govern itself, the more it invites FOOLs to disrupt the citizens and complicate society. So just as a healthy community creates a virtuous cycle of prosperity, an unhealthy community invites a negative spiral of constant interference of foolish interference.
I don’t “fear” the woke, but I don’t want them indoctrinating my children and grandchildren in public schools. Nor do I want them demanding that I celebrate, affirm, and pay for their choices. Marry your washing machine for all I care, just don’t put a gun to my head and demand that I use the machine’s proper pronouns.