Experimental "competitive government" instead of democracy

Until recently, the term "competitive government" has been used to refer to competing policies with regard to democratic institutional arrangements and to the (neo-liberal) introduction of (market-)competitive elements to public administration, such as the privatization and outsourcing of public services (provision of water and electricity, waste disposal, public transportation, health care, etc.), public-private partnerships, and so on.

The term now is about to receive a new meaning thanks to the work of Patri Friedman and others. For them, "competitive government" describes the competition between the political arrangements of entire (future) nation states, be they democratic or otherwise. It is about the freedom of people to decide themselves in what political system they prefer to live and the freedom for every individual to move to a "nation" state/country of his or her choosing. It is about diversity in the forms of government worldwide rather than the uniformity of international "democracy promotion".

For a number of reasons the term "competitive government" may not be ideal, though, for what Friedman and others envisage. After all, unlike today there would be no real competition between such (new) nation states/countries. (Traditionally, competition between national governments and nations too often ends in war.) It's not about dominance, but rather about co-existence and tolerance for other, alternative, diverse forms of government, even "niche" government (political systems that only a minority of people would volunteer to live in). In a competition-theoretical sense, "competitive government" means, however: no monopoly for democracy.

At the same time, the "nation" would have to lose any connotation of blood, ethnicity, and nationalism and come to stand for communities of politically like-minded people instead.

It is safe to say that Friedman is stuck in the terminology of Economics ("competition" rather than accommodation or tolerance, "nation" as the basic entity of political-economic discourse – western democracy promotion suffers from the same competitive misapprehension, inherent in its linkage to capitalist market philosophy and mechanisms).

In Patri Friedman's case this is owed to his family heritage and background. His grandfather, Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel Prize laureate in Economics, was one of the professors who turned the University of Chicago into a centre of so-called neo-liberal thought. The author of books such as "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962), Milton Friedman was a stout defender of the view that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked.

Albeit deeply critical of the (welfare) state and pleading for a government that refrains from interventions in the economy, limits its activities to the bare minimum, and leaves the individual as much as possible alone, he still charged the state with the promotion of competition and the provision of a legal and monetary framework for individual and corporate action, primarily in the market place.

Political power should be dispersed as widely as possible, though, so as to avoid coercion of the individual by his fellow men. Dismissing "welfare" and "equality" as the "catchwords" of paternalistic politics against which classical liberalism fought, Milton Friedman held democracy to be merely a means guaranteeing individual freedom.

Now his grandson, Patri Friedman, declares his opposition to democracy.

Taking his clues from his grandfather and father (David D. Friedman) as much as from the libertarian and anarcho-capitalist traditions, Patri Friedman goes further when claiming – on the most elaborate of his many fragmentary websites and blogs – that he is "deeply dissatisfied with current forms of social organization (western democracy)".

http://patrifriedman.com/aboutme/politics.html

He finds "[s]ocial organization (aka government) [...] is being done really badly right now (democracy is better than previous forms, but still awful), and it can be done better. [...] I think most political discussion is [...] nonsensical reasoning about a useless tradition which has accumulated concentrated interests who benefit from it and have entrenched themselves [...]. By stepping up a level, we neatly avoid getting trapped in endless policy debates, debates which are almost pure intellectual masturbation because the problem is not figuring out a good policy, the problem is that the system (say, democracy) doesn't optimize for 'good'. We can argue for hours about the best tax system – but politicians don't want 'the best', they want one where they can profit by selling loopholes."

The solution Patri Friedman proposes is "competitive government" – and the creation of new spaces in which various forms of government and institutional arrangements (some of them non- or anti-democratic) can develop in their own "nation" states/countries. While people (unless they live in some form of democracy) may no longer get to elect their leaders, they would get to decide under what system of government they wish to live – and move there.

Friedman writes: "My path is not just a path to libertarianism, but to a wider variety of governments and societies. I wish to convince non-libertarians that this is an attractive vision, and that it is something they would like to see happen. I also want to help people of many different political persuasions to get along by seeing ways in which each group can have what they want, instead of arguing endlessly over what they should all have."

The way of getting there, according to him, is experimentation: "Government has stagnated. Very little experimentation. (What do you expect when it's basically impossible to start a new country or change an existing one? How do you expect to get technological advances without experimentation?) [...] Experimenting has some important benefits: It gives us empirical evidence about what rule-systems work. This is enormously more valuable than theoretical debates which depend on model assumptions; It enables people to live under a system while learning about it; It gives people a specific, real example to point to when debating the merits of various systems; They let people actually experience a society, physically and emotionally rather than as a mental abstraction. [...]

"The fewer, larger political systems we have, the less experimentation there will be. Also, the less different types of society we will have. I believe that a world with a diverse set of governments, peacefully competing for citizens, would be a much better one. We might see the technologies of social organization advancing as fast as other areas of science and technology."

Patri Friedman recognizes the difficulty of experimenting with political systems in existing nation states/countries. Much like the Zionists at the beginning of the twentieth century, he aims to solve this problem by creating new nations. (One of the blogs he writes on is entitled "Let A Thousand Nations Bloom".) He proposes to "open the new frontier of the oceans", because international waters provide "a very low barrier to entry to creating a new government, and avoid the powers-that-be". " By building cities on the ocean in a modular fashion, the ocean becomes a permanent frontier, because any dissatisfied group can go to a new, empty patch of ocean, and take their houses and offices with them!. This lets them reset at far lower cost."

"And if we build these cities out of modular platforms, so that people can vote with their house (instead of just their feet), we get a world of unprecendented mobility (ie free association). Together, these have the potential to transform the governing industry from an oligopoly into a competitive market."

Patri Friedman calls this "seasteading". He even founded his own organization, the Seadsteading Institute in Palo Alto, California, whose mission statement reads: "To further the establishment and growth of permanent, autonomous ocean communities, enabling innovation with new political and social systems". It may be the first serious project in the direction of "competitive government" since it received a financial contribution of half a million US dollars from billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal.

www.seasteading.org

Questions remain, of course, like on what basis people are supposed to come together to form a new "nation"/country/community if they do not before have an abstract idea, model, conception of a future society all of them aspire to?

Like anarchist, capitalist libertarians, others too will have to find ways of conceptualizing such non- or anti-democratic societies first, and then put their ideas into practice and to the test in existing or new states, while never ceasing to experiment.

Patri's own libertarian project (which attracted the Silicon Valley start-up funding for his Seasteading Institute) suffers from his erring belief that capitalism can durably be separated from democracy. As his grandfather, Milton, knew full well a capitalist economy will (in the long run) always lead to democratic forms of government – and thus the same old problems.

New forms of government will not be democratic. They will not be capitalist either.

To build a swimming country will always require a lot of money. New non-democratic, non-capitalist societies are therefore unlikely to arise on the high seas. But arise they will.

"Political non-voters" in Germany

A new type of non-voter grabbed the attention of the German media prior to last month's federal election: the conscientious, or political, non-voter.

Non-voting as a political stance against the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy appears to have been popularized by renowned journalists and writers like Gabor Steingart and Thomas Brussig. They and others of similar thinking participated not only in many pre-election talk shows, but published books and essays calling for voter abstinence.

Steingart's book, for example, is titled "Die gestohlene Demokratie" (Stolen Democracy; Piper, September 2009):

www.piper-verlag.de/taschenbuch/buch.php?id=15942&page=buchaz

Non-voting they identify as a mode of resistance to the "political class", the "cartel", and as objection to being treated like "cattle" led to the voting booth. They feel defrauded by the party state and the interchangeability of the programmes of political parties that may have become obsolete and overextended, but cling to power. Parties, they argue, are no longer representative of the people they rule. German democracy thus has become dull and tired. It is a "democracy from above" and politics is made without the people.

In the May 2009 issue of the "magazine for political culture", Cicero, Brussig, a former inhabitant of the German Democratic Republic, wrote: "Every generation deserves its revolution. There was 1968, and there was 1989. From that timing, something is bound to happen soon". With a view to the current economic crisis: "A system that has positioned itself for eternity can collapse all of a sudden. It happens very fast and with a dreamlike ease. Moreover, it is wondrously beautiful" (my translation).

There is no shame in not voting, so their message. If you don't vote, you still set a political sign. Non-voting is the "enlightened" thing to do.

Participation in this year's German elections was indeed the lowest since the end of the Second World War.

A positive agenda for anti-democratic thought

In my book "Anti-Democratic Thought" I first laid out what I like to call "a positive agenda for anti-democratic thought":

In a historical and cross-cultural perspective the fact cannot be denied that most democracies failed. Many formerly democratic countries do not have a democratic government now. Many countries have never known democracy. Only western democracies for a short while – maybe to be dated from the fall of Soviet communism to the rise of radical Islam – believed themselves invincible. It may therefore seem expedient to think about political alternatives once more and to study threats to democracy from within and without as well as common modes of failure of democracy across times and cultures.

Will people's disillusion with democratic practices (such as the impact money has on campaigning), mass politics, and the equal inconsequence of everyone's vote ultimately terminate democracy?

I do not believe that all political systems have been tried yet. Our world is changing rapidly. Will the technological innovations of recent decades, and those to come, make possible political forms that never existed (nor could be imagined) in history – or will we have to fall back, post democracy, into the abyss of authoritarian despotism, as envisaged by Plato and Aristotle?

Oswald Spengler said that money would finally lose its value, its meaning, and politics would reclaim its rightful place.

That is the challenge of our time: reclaiming politics.

My book marks the beginning of a daring new debate. It is not satisfied with studying the historical dimensions of anti-democratic thought – as were so many of our predecessors –, but wishes to study its future too.

The (re-)introduction that opens the volume approaches anti-democratic thought from an angle different from that of earlier authors. Rather than focusing on discourse analysis and similarities in the arguments advanced by various strands of anti-democratic thought, the focus here lies on anti-egalitarianism and the underlying causes that led individuals to thinking and taking up arguments against democracy in the first place.

These reasons have not changed.

Exceptional men and women still are dissatisfied with democracy and the rule of everyone-else over the individual and unwilling to accept at face value the old tendentious and partisan adage that, despite its admitted shortcomings, no better political system is imaginable.

There are many difficulties in trying to make valid statements about anti-democratic thought. That should not stop us. We have to navigate the difficulty that anti-democratic thinkers may contradict each other. So too do democratic thinkers. Anti-democratic thought as much as democracy theory is not a coherent body of work. We need to understand the context in which anti-democratic thought arose and arises. Anti-democratic thought resulting from support for alternative political systems should be kept separate from anti-democratic thought directed against more fundamental principles of democracy, such as equality.

Anti-democratic thought can be – must be – re-invented as a positive project for the twenty-first century. In doing so, we need to avoid making claims that are obviously wrong. To distinguish ourselves from earlier polemical attacks on democracy, we need to phrase each word, each sentence, our whole argument carefully and in a manner that is simple and straightforward and cannot easily be refuted. We need to submit anti-democratic polemics, plays and novels to academic study and turn what we find into scientific knowledge and political resources.

Much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-democratic thought suffered from unfamiliarity with the practical workings of democracy. Criticism was often unsophisticated, repetitive and superficial. It will be the challenge of twenty-first-century anti-democratic thought to criticize democracy, with hindsight, in a more sophisticated manner, to develop and formulate more subtle expressions of anti-democratic thought, to move away from cheap stereotypes and become as analytical and diverse as pro-democratic thought. Different traditions and strands of anti-democratic thought must be allowed to compete freely with each other and with democracy. Intellectuals need to lose the unjustified prejudice in favour of democracy – now just as unjustified as the largely prejudicial anti-democratic thought two-hundred years ago.

We need to confront those who call "anti-democratic" everything they don't like about democracy, and whatever kind of social and political thought they do not understand or approve of, by giving anti-democratic thought clearer contours and new substance.

Anti-democratic thought is no longer to be treated as an inconsequential appendage to democracy theory. University and college courses on "Democracy and Its Critics", may their teachers be in favour or critical of democracy, will benefit from the serious discussion of anti-democratic thought on offer in my book, more than from any apology of democracy.

For more on the history and background of anti-democratic thought and why to study anti-democratic thought and think anti-democratically today, see my chapter "Re-Introducing Anti-Democratic Thought", which is available here:

books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=KkMdJtaaeOYC#PPA1,M1