As in democracies the people seem to act almost as they please, this sort of government has been deemed the most free, and the power of the people has been confounded with their liberty.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
It would seem that the more governments came to rely on popular support (in England in the last third of the nineteenth century), the more willing they became to arouse demands for change instead of letting sleeping dogs lie.#
As kings from medieval times sought to lessen their dependence on the nobility by soliciting the support of town burghers, so did the state in more modern times emancipate itself from the bourgeoisie by enfranchising and buying the votes of successively broader masses of people.#
This state of affairs [consumer sovereignty] has been described by calling the market a democracy in which every penny gives a right to cast a ballot. It would be more correct to say that a democratic constitution is a scheme to assign to the citizens in the conduct of government the same supremacy the market economy gives them in their capacity as consumers.#
All men are liable to error and . . . it could happen that the majority, deluded by faulty doctrines propagated by irresponsible demagogues, could embark on policies that would result in disaster, even in the entire destruction of civilization. But . . . no thinkable method of government could prevent such a catastrophe.#
Lenin’s Bolsheviks of 1917, Mao’s CCP cadres of 1949 and the Congressmen of India came to power by different routes. But they had this in common. All three new ruling groups were men who had never engaged in any other occupation except politics and had devoted their lives to the exploitation of a flexible concept called ‘democracy’.#
Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.#
The more numerous the people are whom one tries to ‘represent’ through the legislative process and the more numerous the matters in which one tries to represent them, the less the word ‘representation’ has a meaning referable to the actual will of actual people other than that of the persons named as their ‘representatives.’#
That majority rule is an expedient rather than itself a basic principle is clearly shown by the fact that our willingness to resort to majority rule, and the size of the majority we require, themselves depend on the seriousness of the issue involved.#
Any minority that counts on specific majority action to defend its interests is short-sighted in the extreme.#
The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.#Quoted in F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
The fundamental absurdity of a majority taxing itself in order to maintain a propaganda organization aimed at persuading the same majority to go further than it is yet willing should be obvious.#
The decisive factor which made the efforts of the [French] Revolution toward the enhancement of individual liberty so abortive was that it created the belief that, since at last all power had been placed in the hands of the people, all safeguards against the abuse of this power had become unnecessary.#
A constitutional system does not involve an absolute limitation of the will of the people but merely a subordination of immediate objectives to long-term ones. . . . It means that the agreement to submit to the will of the temporary majority on particular issues is based on the general understanding that this majority will abide by more general principles laid down beforehand by a more comprehensive body.#
Once it is generally accepted that majority decisions can merely indicate ends and that the pursuit of them is to be left to the discretion of the administrators, it will soon be believed also that almost any means to achieve those ends are legitimate. The individual has little reason to fear any general laws which the majority may pass, but he has much reason to fear the rulers it may put over him to implement its directions.#
We certainly do not regard it as right that the citizens of a large country should dominate those of a small adjoining country merely because they are more numerous. There is as little reason why the majority of the people who have joined for some purposes, be it as a nation or some supranational organization, should be regarded as entitled to extend the scope of their power as far as they please. The current theory of democracy suffers from the fact that it is usually developed with some ideal homogenous community in view and then applied to the very imperfect and often arbitrary units which the existing states constitute.#
If in the Western world universal adult suffrage seems the best arrangement, this does not prove that it is required by some basic principle.#