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Regarding the complementary between democracy and free-market/classical liberalism, I tend to be more skeptical. Democracy, perhaps a standard concept in the US, is actually a fuzzy concept and without any adjectives it's just a principle of distributing political power, nothing more. Liberalism, on the contrary, is a principle of limiting power. There is a tension between them and in Europe democracy was until the beginning of the last century the vehicle of advancing socialism - real, hard-core socialism. It's not a matter of accident that all communist countries called themselves popular democracies. A good book on this is Giovanni Sartori's "The Theory of Democracy Revisited" which puts the concept of democracy in a rich historical and philosophical perspective.

Yes, it all depends what you mean by democracy. If you think that there is a theory of democracy that can provide a deep and true answer to the question "who should rule?" then all the answers are paradoxical (in logic) and they all tend to lead to zero or negagive sum games in practice. The alternative is to take the approach of Mises and later Popper to regard democracy in an instrumental manner as the way to change the national leadership without violence. That will tend to support the idea of a minimal, protective state (protective in the sense of protecting the rule of law and the weak). Mises worked along those lines, possibly as early as his big book on socialism and certainly in the little book on the principles of the liberal order. Popper's contribution can be found in chapter 7 of The Open Society. http://www.the-rathouse.com/popshorterOSE7.html

Rafe,

I would also encourage you to take a look at a work by Hans Herman-Hoppe, "Democracy: the God that Failed." Hoppe takes a socio-economic look at "democracy." Methinks, Hoppe is calling into question the Misean compromise of "democracy;" questioning its utility on "utilitarian" grounds. There, Hoppe looks down upon "democracy" as an alternative system of government; while he does not support adopting monarchy as an alternative to democracy, he asks that readers view the state for what it is: AN INSTITUTION OF COERCION.

Thanks Brian, I am broadly familiar with Hoppe's views. There is a philosophically sophisticated case for anarchism in Jan Lester's "Escape from Leviathan" which was reviwed for the "Mises daily" some time ago. http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=648&FS=Escape%2Bfrom%2BLeviathan
The links refer to an old website, now cast adrift in cyberspace.

It is hard to know whether to go for a zero state or just the minimum state. Some would say that we are all minimum statists now, but some want a bigger minimum than others. Still the main thing in this context is to avoid essentialism, that is endless debate about what the state "really" is. So long as we have the state we need to tame it and get it to do at least some of the things we want, even as we work towards the minimum or maybe even the zero state. We also need to avoid paradoxical theories of sovereignty, as though there is any useful answer to the question "who should rule?" that has more than instrumental value.

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