Democracy

Democracy claims to represent the will of the people, wrapping itself in the language of popular sovereignty and collective decision-making. Yet upon close inspection, we find a paradox: the more that power is delegated to voting, the less power each individual actually holds. Perhaps this is why for many people democracy has lost its luster - not because rule by the people as a concept is flawed, but because we've misunderstood what that even means.

There are in reality three distinct forms of political organization which go by the name of democracy. Once we have properly differentiated the three forms, and only once we have, we can begin to understand both the follies and promise of the concept of democracy.

The first form of democracy is also the first that pops into most people's minds; it is when a group of people vote with equally-weighed votes for a person or party that will exercise power downstream. In order to be truly democratic in this sense, all or nearly all people subject to the powers at question get a vote. We call this "electoral democracy".

Ironically, electoral democracy is the least democratic form of democracy. To understand just how undemocratic this interpretation of democracy is, let us begin by describing the most undemocratic political system imaginable. In such a system, a group of select people holds all the power without any input at all from the rest of the subject population. It is mostly irrelevant whether the power group's policies are benevolent or malicious, freedom-oriented or authoritarian, in all cases the system is distinctly undemocratic.

Now, starting from this least democratic system possible, consider what the smallest possible increment of democratic control would be. The smallest possible change would be a single binary decision shared by the entire population. This is the absolute least amount of democratic input to the system that is more than zero. Yet this is practically the system which passes for democracy in most of the world! The standard picture of democracy is one where people choose left or right, red or blue, this or that. Sure, depending on your country, you might vote for a local representative in addition to a national one. Maybe you even vote for representatives in 3 or more levels of government. Maybe you vote in a primary with many candidates to choose from. Or maybe you have more than just two dominant parties. These things do make the system incrementally more democratic, but at the end of the day they're just marginal increases resulting in just a small handful of decisions from limited choices that everyone has to share with everyone else.

The next step in progressively more democratic systems is what is known as "direct democracy". In this second form of democracy, each decision is voted on by everyone rather than through representatives. The decisions themselves have been decoupled from each other, whereas electoral democracy couples them in decisions for representatives. Besides giving people more decisions overall, this makes each decision more targeted and somewhat less susceptible to capture by special interests. Furthermore, it removes the (likely) possibility of elected officials straying subtly toward their own interests after the election phase.

Of course, direct democracy brings with it a unique set of issues. On the practical side, it can be difficult for voters to be fully informed about all matters and knowledgeable about the alternatives available. No doubt, solving this problem is the primary selling point behind electoral democracies. A single decision between a small set of fixed options once every couple of years is quite manageable for just about anyone; keeping up-to-date about everything in both official and unofficial forums to make informed decisions is literally a full time job. In a direct democracy, everyone has to do this job.

But even with direct democracy we still haven't realized the full potential of democracy because both interpretations so far have assumed that decisions are shared among the group. Electoral and direct democracies fundamentally centralize decision-making and then give that power to some kind of majority. However, this notion by definition subjugates minority groups to majority power; those who lost the vote also lose their share of the power.

To make it concrete, consider a matter such as the allowance of drinking alcohol. The most democratic control over drinking is not a single ban applied to all people or not, whether it be supported by someone who got 51% of the vote, or even a direct vote on the issue with 80% support. No, the most democratic control over drinking is for everyone to influence the culture more or less toward the acceptance of drinking. This can be by drinking one's self, by supporting or denouncing related activities, or even by choosing different people with whom to associate.

Following this notion to its logical conclusion yields the third and final form of democracy. We can call it "distributed democracy". Distributed democracy is the atomization of decision-making power and distribution of it to the people for individual control. It means giving all individuals the power to make decisions independently, autonomously, locally.

It may seem like what we are calling distributed democracy is not democracy but simply liberty. In other words, one might defend a definition of the word "democracy" that centers on its majoritarian forms. That's ok and if this is you then you may interpret the rest of this essay as an argument for liberty over majoritarian democracy. However, first permit me a brief defense of this conception of democracy. Firstly, etymologically and definitionally, "democracy" simply means power (kratia) vested in the general population (demos) as oppose to being vested in one or more select individuals. Atomized, distributed power fits that definition perfectly. Secondly, it is precisely concordant with many common uses outside of politics. When the printing press democratized book publishing, it did not put up to a popular vote what books ought to be printed; it allowed anyone - or at least a much more significant portion of the population - independent power to partake in information distribution. Finally, many canonical elements of political democracy such as civil liberties and other human rights simply instantiate exactly this notion of democracy via distributed control. These are limits on the centralized majority that reserve power to be distributed to individuals. And so, at least to an extent, typical definitions of political democracy already bake in a degree of this expanded conception.

But in order to flesh out and fully understand distributed democracy, it'll be useful to analyze the kinds of decisions that need to be made in the first place. Ultimately, political and economic power boils down to rights over the use of limited resources. This is fairly obviously true when considering decisions made about the application of, and profit from, some form of physical property. It's still fairly obvious when decisions are being made about what kind of buildings or economic activity is allowed in a particular area. It's less obvious when considering decisions on criminalizing vices and other victimless activities, but even this distills down to the question of whether a particular geographical area is to be made an, e.g., alcohol-free zone or not. At the end of the day, even our own time is a limited resource with which a decision has to be made about what to do. Practically all we do as political-economic beings is to make decisions concerning such resources and thus political power is essentially the legal or accepted right to make those decisions.

Limited resources can in turn be broken down into 2 originating sources: human action and economic land. As we've seen, the most democratic control of the first, human action, is not in everyone agreeing on a single plan for what everyone should do and how everyone should act. Rather, it is everyone having full control over, responsibility for liabilities caused by, and property rights over the fruits of, their individual actions. This not only gives everyone roughly an equal share of power (everyone has the same number of hours in a day to act) but it also internalizes costs and benefits while eliminating enforcement costs. Internalizing individuals' costs and benefits then makes it much more compelling to spend time and effort on making good decisions. It is after all one's own hours in the day!

If the distribution of power over each individual's actions directly to that individual seems too obvious, it's because the opposite is de facto slavery. You probably reject slavery at a very intuitive level, and rightly so. Not only is it morally unsound but it is tremendously inefficient. By definition, a human agent makes their own choices, takes their own actions, and has their own preferences or goals. This implies that to get someone to do something you want, that they don't already want, you must force them to do it (de facto slavery) OR give them something they want even more in exchange. The latter occurs spontaneously when each individual is given full power and responsibility over their capacity to act. The former necessitates additional effort to compel the other party against their will. Therefore any system requiring more than individual autonomy, including both centralizing kinds of democracy, invokes coerced action, i.e. de facto slavery.

Does this imply that the rejection of slavery is sufficient to fully embody our strongest notion of democracy? It turns out that the direct coercion of action is not the only way to get people to do what you want them to do, or give you what you want them to give you; and this is not how today's states and other rentiers actually wield power. But to understand how it is possible to indirectly control individuals, we must understand the other object of decision-making: land.

All other human conflicts necessarily reduce to conflicts over economic land[^1]. Indeed, conflicts over the use of land exist on many levels. The two most salient levels are (1) state-like territorial claims and (2) exclusive rights to use land for private benefit. Although the nature of the claims differ, in all cases control is imposed over land, not people. In the first, as long as the people retain the freedom to leave the property (state territory), they are not being held as slaves technically, but merely need to play by the landlord's (state's) rules while on the property. The state is thus able to rent-seek indirectly through its politics. In the latter, which normally takes place within the framework of the state via its property system, the claim is more straightforward and title-holders receive rent (including imputed rent) economically.

[^1]: There can also be conflict over a product of economic land and human action ("labor"). For this we have the term "capital" in the more specific 3 or 4 factor model sense. There can also be conflict over a still further derivative product of other prior capital. However, in all cases and despite any intermediate forms, all production must reduce to a combination of land and labor.

The first two definitions of democracy bundle power over land, at least in the political sense if not in the economic sense, and hand it over to some kind of majority. What's more, in practice residual land rights are almost universally distributed unequally, unjustly[^2], and certainly undemocratically. Therefore, democratizing land, like truly democratizing human action, lies not in centralizing power over it and delegating that to majority votes, but rather in each individual having full control over an equally useful portion of it. The practical realization of this principle requires no more and no less than the complete and equal distribution of land rent[^3]. We could also posit that democratization of land means that every individual has an equally good a priori claim to make use of the earth as they see fit. From this equal bargaining position they may negotiate exclusive rights, which is also realized through the complete and equal distribution of land rent.

[^2]: An adequate treatment of the justice and injustice of certain landed property systems, in particular fee simple property, requires a separate essay. But for now suffice to say that land titles have quite rarely been granted based on ethical principles rather than political expediency.

[^3]: This may appear to be saying that all global land rent must be pooled and shared equally with all people. This is not however necessary. As long as no one (a) is banned from bidding highest to make use of some land, and (b) receives their equal share of rent from land in whose economy they partake, it follows from market actions that people will be able to find opportunities at least as value to them as a global rent-sharing scheme would be able to yield.

To be clear, the distribution of land rights is a nonnegotiable piece of the puzzle. Without it, landless individuals lack unilateral exit options from the control of others. When the basic building blocks of survival (or even standing-room) are gatekept by others, locked-out individuals are forced to associate with one or more of the gatekeepers. And this is for merely the right to make use of economic land (natural opportunity), not for an exchange of mutually beneficial actions or other kind of labor product, in which each party would have a priori equal capacity and power to contribute. Thus in the case of exchange between landowner and landless or land-poor, the two parties come from artificially unequal initial positions of power.

Nor is indirect subjugation of people through land hypothetical. On the contrary, it is the actual mechanism that most modern states and other rentiers employ. Consider the very nature of the state: it is a territorial claim. All subjugation of the population, and rent-seeking at their expense, promulgated through the state is backed by the value of the land within the claimed territory. This is why a state claim over Antarctica is practically useless; no power comes from controlling something that has next to no value to other people, i.e. yields no rent. By contrast, fertile and desirable (high rent) locations are able to withstand enormous degrees of subjugation because it remains worth it on net to accept those costs in exchange for access to the valuable underlying resource. The same analysis holds at the level of private landownership: where the state has not captured all rent, the remaining is extracted by private (subordinate) landowners more directly. So if democracy is the vesting of power to the general population, then it follows that each member of the general population, not just some land-owning class, ought to have a claim to economic land, being the object of political and economic power (and necessary for their survival to), that they can fall back on.

These two notions together - fully distributed, autonomous control over both human action and land - maximize power to the people and constitute a complete distributed democracy. To be sure, neither is necessarily straightforward in practice. The latter in particular, and especially if we reject centralization of control, presents a unique challenge. Failing to broker just land rights is the history of civilization whereas rent-sharing systems have relatively little precedence. And where we dealt with capital being a product of both land and labor in a footnote, the real world demands a practical solution to financially disentangling them. Nonetheless both parts are strictly required in order to realize a distributed democracy.

Human prosperity flows directly or indirectly from human action applied to nature. All political and economic power is a matter of control over these two elements. Democracy, when understood in the electoral and direct senses, fails to give this power to the entirety of the people. Where 19th-21st century democracies have succeeded corresponds better with strong civil liberties and individual rights - limits on centralized majoritarian power - than with the centralized majoritarian power itself. Those protections, being a kind of distributed democracy in action, remain a critical component in the realization of democracy in the strongest sense.

Critically, this strongest sense of democracy also requires the assertion of each individual's equal claim to make use of the earth. Undoubtedly, this part has been a missing piece more often than not throughout history. This is not an accident. Those who benefit from undemocratic distributions of power are strongly incentivized to maintain the status quo and redirect democratic aspirations toward less threatening channels such as centralized, thus subvertible even if democratic, bodies of power, and pittances, so-called public services and entitlements, that keep the general population dependent and sufficiently distant from revolutionary desperation. The challenge is then not to perfect the machinery of voting, but rather to all but abandon it and instead (a) double-down on securing individual liberties, and (b) finally, truly, democratize access to natural opportunity. Only then will it be possible to move beyond shallow notions of democracy toward one that puts real power directly into the hands of each and every person.