Welcoming Remarks

Recorded at the Mises Circle in Seattle, 14 September 2019.

Elites in America spent the twentieth century lecturing us about the unquestioned virtue of democracy and voting. But they change their tune when the wrong guy wins. Donald Trump, Brexit, and the rise of right-populist movements in Europe all challenge the West’s great sacred cow.

Hans Hoppe famously reconsidered the cult of democracy in his 2001 book Democracy: The God that Failed. Democratic politicians and voters, with high time preference and no skin in the game, give us endless spending, debt, entitlements, and war — not liberty.

Our speakers will apply Hoppe’s critique to the upcoming 2020 presidential election, which promises to be brutal. What are the limits of democracy in a country of 320 million people? Have we reached the end of the myth of democratic consensus? What if democratic voting, so called, doesn’t yield any compromise between Left and Right — but only creates endless division and an entrenched political class? And what might the future of democracy look like? Hint: decentralized, smaller, local.