… from page 144 of Anthony de Jasay’s brilliant 1998 volume, The State (original emphasis):
Private property, capital as the source of countervailing power, reinforcing the structure of civil society versus the state, used to be considered valuable both to those who owned some and to those who did not. Liberal thought no longer recognizes such value. It considers that democratic procedure is the source of unlimited sovereignty.
This truth is as sad as it is undeniable. Modern “liberals” – “Progressives” – are both suckered by, and proponents of, what is perhaps the most treacherous political myth to be held by modern humans, namely, that regular corruption-free elections with a wide franchise are sufficient to keep the power of the state within appropriate bounds. It isn’t only that “Progressives” stubbornly ignore public-choice realities. They also believe in the existence of a mythical ‘People’s will’ or ‘People’s voice’ that they treat as a god whose desires and commands (always, of course, interpreted by the secular priests called ‘politicians’ and a select few high-church pundits) ought always override the wishes and desires of puny flesh-and-blood individuals.
Let me add this – Progressives do not merely believe in the “popular” vote as when they passed the Seventeenth Amendment. That was merely a means to an end – the unshackling of States Rights by which the goal was a single “Federal Government” with States merely subdivisions. The diminishment of the Right to Private Property (and labor), the argument above, also stems from Socialism and the Progressive yearnings for the Administrative State – the Hobbesian Leviathan where there is no “vote” at all as all we should have, according to these incremental Socialists, are non-partisan, expert bureaucrats making decisions for the rest of us, having only our best interests at heart.
As we have seen with the Obama Administration, on steroids, is that the bureaucracy is far from being non-partisan and in many cases, not all that bright either. Yet, this is “progress”.
(H/T: Café Hayek)
