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U.S. Economic
Freedom Hits Historic Low...
The United States is no
longer among the world’s top 15 freest economies. In fact, according to an annual
index released by the
Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, the U.S. fell from being the sixth-freest
economy in the world when President Barack Obama took office in 2009 to being
the 17th freest economy in the world today.
The U.S. economic freedom score for 2017 was
75.1 out of 100. This means economic freedom in the U.S. has fallen to its
lowest level since the Heritage Foundation started keeping track in 1995.
America now ranks behind such nations as Chile, Estonia, Hong Kong, Singapore
and the United Arab Emirates. Since the Heritage Foundation ranks countries
with scores above 80 as economically “free,” it has only ranked the U.S. as
“mostly free” since 2009.
The Heritage economic freedom index is
calculated based on 12 factors of economic freedom, including property rights,
government spending, freedom from corruption, fiscal freedom, monetary freedom,
business freedom, labor freedom, trade freedom, investment freedom and
financial freedom. The 2017 report lists large budget deficits, an enormous
national debt, a substantial expansion of government bureaucracy and an increased
tax burden as contributing factors to the decline in America’s economic
freedom.
Another index of economic
freedom, published by the
Fraser Institute, shows that the U.S. fell from being second freest economy in
1980 to being the 16th freest economy in 2014. According to this assessment,
U.S. economic freedom actually rose from 1980 to 2000 but has been in steady
decline since the turn of the millennium.
The Fraser Institute reports that the U.S.
economic freedom index fell from 8.07 to 7.75 between 1980 and 2014, while
China’s economic freedom index rose from 3.64 to 6.45 during the same time
period. As the U.S. turns its back on Adam Smith-style capitalism and China
turns its back on Mao Zedong-style communism, both nations are adopting a mixed
socialist market economy where property is privately owned but micromanaged by
government bureaucrats.
Germany and most members of the European Union
also have economic freedom scores in the “moderately free” zone, a category
associated with mixed socialist market economies and authoritarian
bureaucracies.
For the past two centuries, the form of
government championed by Britain and America—a form of government that has at
its heart some important biblical principles—has spread throughout the Western
world. Yet, in recent years, nations around the globe have been turning their
back on the Anglo-American methods of economic management.
Even many key American officials have adopted
an approach similar to Barack Obama’s philosophy that nations should not debate the ideologies
of capitalism and communism, but instead should pursue a mixed economy that
uses bits of Communist theory and bits of capitalist theory.
Democracy Is Dying
By Richard Palmer
Across the world, democracy is dying.
Self-government—once viewed as the ideal of freedom and the only way to fairly
administer a country—to the younger generation has become “meh.”
In the United States, only 30 percent of
those born in the 1980s say it is “essential” to live in a democracy, according
to data from the World Values Survey (1995–2014). Only 19 percent of them say a
military takeover, in the case of the government being incompetent or failing
to do its job, is not legitimate in a democracy. Only one third of them say
civil rights are “absolutely essential.” In 2015, one in six said they were
fine with a military coup. (In 1995, that number was one in 16.) A 2011 survey
found that nearly a quarter of young people thought democracy was a “bad” or
“very bad” way to run the country.
“Three decades ago, most scholars simply
assumed that the Soviet Union would remain stable,” wrote Roberto Stefan Foa
and Yascha Mounk—the academics who compiled these statistics—in the Journal
of Democracy. “This assumption was suddenly proven false. Today, we have
even greater confidence in the durability of the world’s affluent, consolidated
democracies. But do we have good grounds for our democratic self-confidence?”
(July 2016).
“What we find is deeply concerning,”
they warned. “Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in
North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their
political leaders. Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value
of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might
influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian
alternatives. The crisis of democratic legitimacy extends across a much wider
set of indicators than previously appreciated.”
Similar data shows the same trend
forming in Sweden, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the United
Kingdom.
The death of democracy has already gone
beyond the theoretical. It is affecting ballot boxes across the world.
Everywhere you look, you clearly see early warning signs of the death of
democracy. And biblical prophecy strongly indicates that this trend is going to
accelerate.
Pirates
Since World War ii, the Western world has come to a
consensus on what a democracy should look like: a system of government that has
been termed liberal democracy. The West dreamed of spreading this
enlightened ideal of representative self-government around the world, pushing
back socialism, communism and/or dictatorships and tyrannies and giving everyone
worldwide the freedom to govern themselves.
But not only has the West failed to
export its prized product, it is rotting on its own shelves. Democracy in
Britain, Europe, America and beyond is crumbling. This has been visible in
decade-long trends and in recent elections. And it is more than a rejection of
certain politicians or parties. It shows a world no longer happy with the way
government works, even in free societies. It shows a world where voters are so
dissatisfied with democracy that they are willing to conduct live experiments
on themselves with alternative and even radical forms of government.
One alternative is the pirates. On Oct.
29, 2016, pirates came close to taking over Iceland. These were not literal
pirates, but the Icelandic Pirate Party.
The pirate movement is one of the newest
in politics. It morphed from a protest against restrictive online copyright
enforcement to a political movement, promoting the right to privacy, government
transparency and free speech.
The party was founded just four years
ago, but in October it won 15 percent of the vote, making it the third most
popular party in Iceland. That’s explosive growth.
Like almost everywhere else in the
world, it’s easy to see why Icelandic voters have so forcefully rejected
politics as usual. Earlier in 2016, the Panama papers revealed massive
corruption at the top of Iceland’s government, leading to the resignation of
the prime minister.
A key platform of the pirate parties in
Iceland and across Europe—and the biggest way they reject “liberal
democracy”—is their support for direct democracy. Just about all of the West’s
liberal democracies are representative democracies. The people choose a
representative; the representative is charged with lawmaking, judging or
administering the way that he thinks best within the constitution; and if
voters disagree, they vote him out at the end of his term—if not sooner.
But when elected representatives are as
corrupt as the Panama papers, Wikileaks and other leaks reveal, it’s easy to see
why voters want something different. Under direct democracy, citizens vote
directly on the policies themselves, cutting out the middleman.
Beppe Grillo, the former comedian who is
looking more and more like the future prime minister of Italy, leads a direct
democracy group: the Five Star Movement. The Netherlands passed a law last year
that allows petitions to trigger referenda on legislation.
Peasants
At the same time the pirates assaulted
Iceland, a farmers’ party stormed to power in Lithuania in two rounds of
elections, held on October 9 and 23. Before the election, the Peasant and
Greens Union held just one seat in parliament. Now it is the largest party,
with 54.
Once again there is a new party; once
again people are fed up with politics as usual. But instead of giving the
people more power, this coalition wants to give them less. One of the core
policies of the Peasant and Greens Union is to create a technocratic
government. Because elected politicians have made a big mess, it reasons,
Lithuania needs to appoint experts to deal with it.
This too is an idea that has spread far
and is gaining more popularity after America’s presidential election. “The
election of Donald Trump as president of the United States may have signaled
the death of the closest thing we have to a religion in politics,” wrote former
British Conservative mp
Matthew Parris. “On both sides of the Atlantic, democracy risks being knocked
from the high altar as an unmitigated and unquestioned good” (Spectator,
Nov. 9, 2016).
Jason Brennan, a political philosopher
at Georgetown University, has just written a book called Against Democracy.
He advocates instead for an epistocracy—meaning rule by the
knowledgeable. “Trump’s victory is the victory of the uninformed,” he wrote in Foreign
Policy. “But, to be fair, Clinton’s victory would also have been. Democracy
is the rule of the people, but the people are in many ways unfit to rule” (Nov.
10, 2016).
Clearly, it’s not just young people
souring on democracy. Many of the elites have too.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are
really part of this same movement. The European Union has followed this
approach for decades. In America, politicians from both sides of the aisle have
allowed the number of unelected bureaucrats in America to grow to the point
that over 2.5 million non-military personnel now work in the executive branch.
They are appointed, not elected. Yet this sprawling mass of bureaucrats
includes myriad agencies that have the power to pass laws, try cases and
enforce punishments. They call these laws “regulations.” And the average
citizen has little to no recourse against this bureaucratic state.
The more control these bureaucrats have,
the less control the people have. The natural allies of bureaucrats,
technocrats, epistocrats and their related synonyms are leftists, because they
all want the same solution: big government.
‘Illiberal
Democracy’
But not everyone is happy about big
government. And the fight-back is leading to another movement: “illiberal
democracy.” This was a term used by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to
describe those who, like himself and Donald Trump, are democratic but reject
many of the norms of the modern Western state. They do things that some
consider beyond the pale, things that democratic leaders should never do, no
matter how strong their mandate.
These “illiberal” democracies tend to be
built around strongmen: leaders who are democratically elected but who greatly
emphasize their personal power to solve their nation’s problems.
In many ways, this is the hardest trend
to describe, because so much is distorted. The left has gained control of many
of the levers of power in liberal democracy. It has used the bureaucracies, the
judiciaries, the media, the schools and even central banks to move nations to
the left. When leaders on the right want to change their country’s direction,
they can only do so by “interfering” with the leftist policies of these
bureaucracies, judiciaries, government-owned broadcasters, etc. When they do
this, the left screams blue murder.
But all this crying wolf is dangerous.
It makes it hard to see where leaders are just pushing back against leftist
control, and where they are genuinely altering the government toward
illiberalism or oppression. Hungary and Poland are two governments singled out
as being “illiberal democracies.” Are they truly illiberal? There is certainly
some concerning news. But with all the heated rhetoric, it’s hard to tell what
is really going on. A person is not a Nazi because he criticizes the decision-making
of a central bank or because he wants to see an out-of-control supreme court
reined in. The left’s smears against Poland, Hungary and the Trump
administration make it harder to detect if and when these governments do, in
fact, take actions that are genuinely dangerous.
Escalation
These movements all feed off each other.
The more the elites take power, the more people are determined to take it back,
and vice versa.
Italy was forced into a technocratic
government from 2011 to 2013. During that time, the direct democracy-supporting
Five Star Movement exploded in popularity in a major reaction against
technocracy. The first time the Dutch used their new powers of direct
democracy, it was to strike down an EU treaty with Ukraine—a strike aimed at
the technocrats in the EU. However, the technocrats quickly began working on a
method they hope the Dutch government will use to ignore the vote.
Many in Britain hate the EU for its
anti-democratic nature and elitism. And when Britain voted to leave in a rare instance
reminiscent of direct democracy, this only proved to the elites that the people
do not deserve and cannot handle the power to govern themselves.
Direct democracy and illiberal democracy
have some common ground. One wants to give power directly to the people,
whereas the other trusts a single individual to smash the status quo. But both
are quickly opposed by the elites. The elites oppose the “illiberals” or “the
people” grabbing power, so they seek to grab more power back—and must become
more extreme in order to do so.
These countries are just examples from
the most recent elections. They are not rare. A new political party winning
support in a European nation has become so common that it barely makes the
news. Greece, Lithuania, Iceland, Portugal, Spain, France, Finland, the
Netherlands and Sweden are all major examples of this trend. That represents a
lot of people who are dangerously dissatisfied with the status quo of modern
democracy.
It is important to recognize that one
can make legitimately strong criticisms about all these alternatives. America’s
founders rejected direct democracy for good reasons. Rule by elites
concentrates power in the hands of the few; the best-laid plans of expert
bureaucrats gang aft agley—go often askew. As F. A. Hayek put it, “The
curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know
about what they imagine they can design.” Strongmen can, and often have, become
strong dictators.
Still, none of these movements are
Nazis. All are supported by well-meaning people, most of whom would protest any
suggestion that they are anti-democratic. But their support all rises from some
kind of sense that the system is broken, and that we need to make big changes
to the way we’re doing things. They share many views of the 25 percent of young
people who believe that democracy is “bad,” even if they might reject that
conclusion. They are all symptoms of the deep dissatisfaction with the way
Western government works, and the sense that democracy has let us down.
Once even a significant minority starts
to lose hope in democracy, the trend is hard to stop. It creates its own
vicious cycle. In the 1930s, upstart parties rose with similar speed to those
that are rising today. Their rise meant the established parties no longer held
enough votes to form governments, and the regular coalitions no longer worked.
Democracies became even more dysfunctional, more people became convinced of the
need for something else, and the spiral worsened.
Furthermore, the problems building in
today’s world will only get worse. Europe’s economic crisis continues to rumble
on with no sign of a solution. Parts of Europe are stagnating, with Great
Depression levels of unemployment. Even Germany, Europe’s engine of growth,
seems likely to encounter an economic crisis. America is swimming in debt and
is poised for disaster.
If masses are rejecting the system now,
how much worse will the situation get when millions more find themselves
without work? When millions of families have real worries about whether they’ll
be able to keep their home?
Returning to the academics we started
with, Public Radio International reported on an interview with Yascha Mounk,
writing, “Mounk believes at least part of the explanation for the
disenchantment with democracy is economic. Most citizens of established liberal
democracies have been contending with stagnant or falling incomes for the past
20 or 30 years. They may believe the system has failed them, while their
children face an even more uncertain future” (Nov. 29, 2016).
An economic crash would make that future
radically less certain. And the sense that the system has failed would explode
into chaos or anarchy.
Why
Governments Fail
The global dissatisfaction ties in with
a great many forecasts that the Poor Man has
made for a decade: the breakdown of the political order in the United States;
the rise of strongmen in Asia; Europe’s turn toward nationalism; the creation
of a new, undemocratic European superstate.
Underlying all this is a simple cause:
Man simply has no good way of ruling over man. He does not have the capacity.
None of man’s governments has created or can create peace, stability and order.
We are now seeing the latest round of men deciding that yesterday’s perfect
ideal of a system has failed, and scurrying around to find tomorrow’s new
ideal.
It is a failure not of politics but of
human nature. No system eliminates greed and selfishness.
But that doesn’t mean that all systems
of government are equally bad. Some do a much better job than others of
restraining selfish human nature.
A simple understanding of history should
warn of the dangers in rejecting liberal democracy and embracing alternatives.
Looking at the broad sweep of history, most people in the West have never had
it so good. The vast majority of mankind for the vast majority of history has
lacked the freedoms that most of us take for granted.
As Winston Churchill put it, “Democracy
is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been
tried from time to time.”
America’s Founding Fathers knew some of
the problems with human nature. They designed a system of government that would
restrain it. Government in the rest of the English-speaking world and beyond
grew out of a similar tradition. After World War ii, many of the rest of the world’s
democracies were founded on similar principles.
All these alternatives to liberal
democracy fail to protect from the dangers of human nature. Illiberal democracy
concentrates power in one strongman and frees him of checks and balances.
That’s great if that man has little of the selfish, greedy, corrupt human
nature. And what if that power corrupts him? It always does. And what about his
successor? Technocracy gives power to a few elites, again, with few checks or
balances. They become a gang of heavyweights that is almost impossible to rein
in—without resorting to a strongman. Yet these experts still have the same
human nature that has given liberal democracy such a bad rap.
Direct democracy is the least tried of
all the alternatives. Its experiment in ancient Greece was an absolute
disaster. Direct democracy—mob rule—has proven dangerous and volatile.
Regardless of how it would work in practice in a modern setting, it certainly
would not solve the problems caused by human nature.
History and human nature, then, warn us
to beware. Bible prophecy gives us an even more specific reason.
A
Dangerous Ending
The last two centuries have been
Anglo-American centuries. The form of government championed by these nations—a
form of government that has at its heart some important biblical principles—has
spread throughout the Western world.
This global falling out with the
Anglo-American method of government is in tandem with the decline of Britain
and America.
Now, we are witnessing the final
failures of these man-devised governments. Human experiments in government have
ultimately failed, every single time. And today’s radical experiments on live
patients in a world full of terror and weapons of mass destruction will culminate
in the ultimate lesson: Human beings actually are incapable of governing
themselves.
This final failure will force us to
accept that fact. The rise of pirates, peasants and Donald Trump shows that we
are desperate for alternatives. We are not yet desperate enough to consider the
government of God as an alternative. But when this experiment finally ends, we
will be.
Yours for another revolution,
Bruce ‘the Poor Man’
Post Script…
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