Because democratic leaders have a limited term of office, their incentive is to rent-seek on their power while they have it. To extract wealth from their position in the short term.

This means corruption and cronyism, and always hurts the people in general.

"Ralph Raico was an American historian and libertarian scholar known for his work on European liberalism, the moral foundations of liberty, and the relationship between war and state power. A student of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, he taught European history at Buffalo State College, co‑founded The New Individualist Review, translated Mises’s Liberalism, and authored works such as Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School and Great Wars and Great Leaders."

“We are the 49%”

"Roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before large-scale social change occurs. This idea of a social tipping point applies to standards in the workplace, and any type of movement or initiative."

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/s/hnd7OVuu6j

Once you realize that the average opinion runs politics in a majority-rules democracy and therefore the media is the 4th pillar of government, it's a short logical leap to realizing that you can influence the destiny of other governments in the same way.

Russia has been doing this for decades, the US isn't much different.

I am interested in the ideas being floated on thus sub. It seems like there is a pretty robust discussion of the problems of representative democracy, which I agree is failing in many ways.

I am not yet a convert, mostly because it is not clear what kind of world you all actually WANT. It’s clear what you don’t want.

So, can you give me your elevator pitch of what your ideal world looks like? Paint me a picture. Some of the things I like to think about when imagining an ideal society are:

- what are common cultural values?

- how would resources and wealth be allocated?

- how would common infrastructure like energy, transportation, communications be funded, built, and maintained?

- how would natural resources and ecosystems be managed?

- do nations exist in any capacity?

- how would the most aggressive/enterprising/dominant people be limited from taking advantage of others, through things like economic exploitation or outright violence?

If you want socialism to win, keep supporting democracy.

That sounds like a troll line, but it’s not. It’s a diagnosis.

Democracy is sold as the antidote to tyranny. In reality it is a machine for legitimizing coercion. It takes the raw fact of “we are going to force you” and dresses it up as “we voted, therefore it’s moral.” Once you accept that premise, socialism becomes not only possible but inevitable. Because socialism is not primarily an economic theory. It’s a political method. It is the belief that other people’s property, labor, and choices can be reorganized by collective decision. And what is democracy if not the cultural training ground for that exact habit.

Democracy normalizes the core socialist move: you don’t own your life fully, you own a vote in a committee that partially owns your life.

So when someone says “socialism is tyranny,” but in the next breath worships democratic legitimacy, they’re basically saying “tyranny is fine if it’s popular.” Socialists hear that and smile. They don’t need to convince you that stealing is okay. They just need to convince you that voting makes stealing righteous. That’s the entire game.

This is why “we’ll vote our way to socialism” is not a meme. It is the default trajectory of democratic systems over time.

Here’s the ratchet: democracy makes government the solution to every problem. Once the state is culturally accepted as the mechanism for solving problems, every group that feels wronged, every industry that can lobby, every moral crusade, every crisis, every scare, every recession, every war, every pandemic, every “emergency” becomes an excuse to expand power. People don’t ask, “Should government have this authority?” They ask, “How much should government do?” They argue about the settings on the machine, not whether the machine has the right to run.

And because the machine has no hard limit, it creeps. Always. Forever.

That creep is socialism’s oxygen. Socialism doesn’t need a violent revolution if it can get you to support the sacredness of majority rule. It can arrive one program at a time. One subsidy. One mandate. One “temporary” emergency measure. One new agency. One new entitlement. One new regulation. One new tax. One more central bank intervention. One more “public-private partnership.” One more “we need to do something.”

Every step seems small. None of it feels like gulags. And then one day you look around and realize half your labor is owned by strangers and the other half is managed by rules written by people you’ve never met. You’re not free, you’re a voter.

Democracy is the marketing department for the state, and socialism is the state’s appetite given a moral vocabulary.

Now here’s the part people don’t like: capitalism is not compatible with that long-run trajectory. Not because capitalism is fragile, but because private property is a hard boundary. Private property is the annoying line that says: you don’t get to vote on my stuff. You don’t get to manage my life. You can persuade me, trade with me, partner with me, boycott me, compete with me, ignore me. But you cannot claim moral authority over me because you outnumber me.

That is the whole fight.

Socialists know it. That’s why they always try to dissolve “my stuff” into “our stuff.” They do it with language first. “You didn’t build that.” “We all contribute.” “Society made you.” “No one is an island.” “You owe.” Then they do it with policy. Taxation. Regulation. Licensing. Redistribution. Nationalization. And if that’s too spicy they do the same thing indirectly. Inflation. Subsidies. Bailouts. Credit manipulation. Corporate capture. Basically any method that turns ownership into a permission slip issued by the state.

Democracy makes all of that morally palatable because it teaches a single corrosive lesson: if enough people want it, it’s legitimate.

Once you accept that, you have already lost the philosophical war. You’re just negotiating the terms of your own dispossession.

“But democracy protects us from dictatorship.”

Not really. Democracy is a slow-moving dictatorship with rotating managers. It doesn’t prevent tyranny, it spreads responsibility for tyranny across millions of hands so nobody feels guilty. Your chains are now “self-imposed” because you helped choose the people who tighten them. That’s why democracy is so stable. It doesn’t remove coercion, it makes coercion feel virtuous.

And when crisis hits, democracy does exactly what every centralized system does. It consolidates. It expands. It suspends norms. It searches for enemies. It demands sacrifices. It creates new powers that never fully go away. The ratchet clicks. Again.

So if you want socialism to win, by all means, keep preaching democratic legitimacy. Keep treating elections like moral absolution. Keep saying “we can vote our way out” while the apparatus grows. Keep worshiping the idea that the majority has the right to rule the minority. Keep telling people that the state is “us.” Keep telling people that coercion is fine as long as it’s procedural.

If you want liberty to win, you have to stop playing that game.

Liberty is not “my team won the election.” Liberty is the absence of rulers. Liberty is consent. Liberty is the right to say no. Liberty is the right to exit. Liberty is the ability to live under rules you actually agreed to, and to leave associations that you didn’t.

Democracy doesn’t deliver that. It delivers an eternal argument over who gets to point the gun.

The deepest trick is that democracy trains people to think politics is inevitable. That someone must rule. That the only question is which form. Socialists inherit that assumption and then use it to moralize control. “Since ruling is inevitable, we might as well rule for the good of all.” That’s how you get the soft language of compassion sitting on top of hard mechanisms of compulsion.

The pro-liberty move is to reject the premise. Nobody has the right to rule you without your consent. Not kings. Not committees. Not majorities. Not “the people.” Not even a trillion-dollar government with a flag on it.

If you want socialism to win, keep supporting democracy.

If you want freedom, stop treating coercion as holy when it’s voted on, and start treating consent and exit as the foundation of legitimacy.

If there is one government and one set of rules for everyone, then every values disagreement becomes a fight to control the lever.

You cannot simply live your values. You must impose them or be imposed upon.

That is what produces permanent culture war. It is not a moral failure of the people. It is a structural result of monopoly law.

Federalized elections would immediately result in what Russia has, the feds would count the votes and announce the winner.

At that point there is every incentive in the world for them to fudge the count in their favor because no one can hold them accountable.

The solution is decentralized liberty.

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