Reversing Government Control.

• Author: Leef, George

Another election season has come and gone. We were bombarded with messages for and against various candidates and messages merely imploring us to vote. Some Americans relish what they think they will get from the outcome; others dread its results. In any case, we accept that, for all its flaws, democracy is the way the United States is supposed to work.

In his book Liberty in Peril, Florida State University economist Randall Holcombe argues that democracy was not the way the country is supposed to work. Our founding philosophy was that liberty should prevail, not democracy--that the reason for government was to protect the individual's freedom, not to subject him to the will of the majority. Over time, the philosophy of liberty has been shoved aside and today democracy rules to the point where, as the author puts it, liberty has an almost quaint air about it.

As Holcombe's subtitle suggests, this is a work of history, explaining the nation's shift from the ideology of liberty to the ideology of democracy. He observes that there is a tension between the two. Under the ideology of liberty, the important question is how to put limits on government so that it can protect individual rights. Under the ideology of democracy, the question is who will hold power to do what the public wants. Where the former prevails, the people tend to have a healthy wariness of government and desire to keep it in check. Where the latter prevails, the people eagerly listen to politicians who promise them benefits from the government.

Consensus / Holcombe begins his history not with the Constitution or even the colonists, but with the Iroquois, the largest confederation of Indians that European settlers encountered. The Iroquois had an unwritten constitution and its key principle was unanimity. Colonists who became familiar with the Iroquois system commented on its "absolute notion of liberty." The Iroquois had a Great Council composed of tribal chiefs, but it did not act like we expect legislatures to act: imposing decisions on the people. Instead, the Great Council facilitated the building of consensus among the tribes. Questions were debated and then the chiefs would return to their tribes to assess the sense of their members. Not until a proposal (and I wish Holcombe had said what kinds of issues the Iroquois dealt with) was acceptable to all the tribes was it adopted. That "debate it until we have consensus" mode meant that little was done, but to the Iroquois...