Constitutions are Laws, Not Alternatives to Laws

By Robert H.

Here is a mistake lots of libertarians make.  "Democracy sucks; it must be bound by strict, constitutional limits on government; so let's have more constitutional limits on government."

The problem is that Constitutions are laws.  That means that if you have a fundamental problem with the way laws are made, "rely more on constitutions" can't be the answer.  I mean, how do you select the constitutional constraints and principles of a limited government?  The current answer in America is "with a supermajority," but super majoritarian voting is even more susceptible to most criticisms of majoritarian voting than majoritarian voting itself.  Take the two criticisms kling cites in my link: 1. supermajorities don't solve the problem of voter ignorance.  Now, instead of a majority of informed people, we have to scare up a SUPERMAJORITY to create good policy. 2. Supermajorities don't solve the problem of forcing voters to join a coalition to effect change.  Now they have to join an even bigger coalition!  

Things aren't better on the enforcement side.  How do you enforce constitutional principles of limited government?  The current answer is "with elected politicians or those they appoint."  But those are the same guys who make laws!  If they can't be trusted to do the latter, why the former?

It's laws all the way down, and the fact that one set of constitutional law makers made one constitution in 1789 which libertarians like one interpretation of is not a reason to think "constitutionalism" will solve libertarian problems with democracy.  So, just for a practical example, the most popular model constitution for new nations to adopt has been, since the wall fell, the German basic law.  Germany also attracts lots of migrants, and would attract more if immigration restrictions were lifted.  But the German constitution would make a libertarian's heart seize up: it's littered with second generation rights (ie, mushy socialist stuff like rights to a clean environment or to healthcare) and isn't particularly federalist.  If both super majoritarianism and migration have created and fortified a popular constitutional model libertarians hate, what's the alternative libertarian method for creating and preserving "good" constitutions?  Military coups?

So here's the math: to make a constitutional regime libertarians like, they would have to convince a supermajority.  To just pass good laws they approve of, they would have to convince a majority.  Instead of writing off democracy and embracing the first model, libertarians who go the second route will have a far easier time.  Scoreboard time: In the last 50 years American democracy killed segregation, slashed tariffs, ended the draft, embraced LGBT rights, lowered top marginal tax rates, had an amnesty for migrants, embraced Friedman's monetary ideas, etc. etc.  Libertarian ideas can and have won at the polls. In that same amount of time, more or less no libertarian constitutional amendments were passed*.   Learn your lesson, people.

*Maybe the 24th?  

Give me "Liberty" or Give me *Liberty*?

By Robert H.

We are fast approaching a world where “liberty” is not just an important, but a key constitutional principle.  Two quick examples: 1. “Liberty” has become so central to Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence that academic clevermen are starting to argue it is the key to understanding his otherwise scattershot rulings.  That’s 1/9^th of Supreme Court rulings animated by the principle of "liberty."  2.  Among more conservative members of the Court, the word is also popping up as a guidestone.  For example, Justice Scalia’s dissent in the Obamacare case was thematically, if not legally, rooted in a desire to protect individual liberty.  Take the closing sentences of the dissent, “The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today's decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.”

This focus on liberty should deeply, sincerely trouble originalists, because “liberty” is a word that has  radically changed its meaning since the foundational generation.  To get a sense of its current dominant meaning, take a look at the full paragraph from which that Scalia quote is pulled from:

The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections — notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers — are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court to teach otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections [*2677]of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied [**573] in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today's decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.

It seems to me that “liberty” is used interchangeably with “personal freedoms” there.  Structural limits on federal power protect “personal freedom,” presumably freedom to do as we will without government interference, and therefor they protect “liberty.” 

But the founders, while they used “liberty” to mean “personal freedoms,” made important and widespread use of at least one other meaning of “liberty.”  I’ll give you two examples:

1.  Franklin’s famous quote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” does not mean what you think it means. Benjamin Wittes has the story, but to summarize, Franklin was a member of the Pennsylvania colonial legislature when he said that, and he said it in the context of a tax dispute.  The legislature claimed it had the right to tax the Penn family in order to provide for frontier defense, the Penns were willing to offer the legislature money for frontier defense as a gift, but only so long as the legislature abrogated any right to tax them, and Franklin was speaking out against that bargain.  “You can have your money for frontier defense [temporary safety], but only if you give up a big part of your power to tax [essential liberty].”  The “essential liberty” being given up isn't personal freedoms, it’s the prerogative of a democratic legislature to tax citizens.  Not what libertarians typically mean by the word “liberty” today. 

2. Look at this quote from Federalist 18:

Philip [of Macedon] gladly seized the opportunity of executing the designs he had long planned against the liberties of Greece. By his intrigues and bribes he won over to his interests the popular leaders of several cities; by their influence and votes, gained admission into the Amphictyonic council; and by his arts and his arms, made himself master of the confederacy.

To my mind, in that context the “liberties of Greece” mean something more like “self rule” than “personal freedom” in that passage.  For one thing, it’s not clear to me as an historical matter that the average Hellene had less personal freedom under Philip.  For another, the essay in general is about the danger of loose confederacies being dominated by outside powers, and that passage specifically is about Phillip taking over Greece.  They aren't talking about the danger of tyrants to personal freedom, nor about what Phillip did to the personal freedom of Greeks after his takeover.

Those examples are not exhaustive, and they indicate some weird meaning of “liberty” used by the founders that seems to have more to do with self-government than personal freedom.  Fortunately, the foudners explained themselves.  This quote is from the declaration of the first continental congress (IE, the one that didn’t declare independence):

Resolved, 4. That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council.

Hey, that makes sense!  To the founders, representative democracy was foundational to liberty, and liberty meant the same thing as “free government.”  There was at least a sense in which “liberty,” to the founders, didn’t mean “personal freedom,” it meant “free government,” and the cornerstone of that was the right to participate in your own, representative democracy.  The legislature not being able to tax people is an assault on “liberty” in that sense, because it robs power from the representative government.  A king taking over some democratic city states is an assault on “liberty” in that sense, because it replaces representative goveryment, however flawed, with monarchy.  Americans not getting to sit in parliament is an assault on “liberty” in that sense, because they aren't being allowed to participate in representative government.    

Note that this kind of means the exact opposite of the other meaning of liberty.  If liberty means “personal freedom, especially from the government,” then a government that can tax me is a government under which I am less free.  But if liberty means “the right to participate in an empowered, representative parliament,” then if my legislatures can’t vote to tax people I have *less* liberty.  To tie it back to Scalia’s dissent, Scalia thinks separation of power protects “liberty” because it limits government and thus promotes personal freedom.  But it is also possible that it protects “liberty” because distributed power prevents republics from turning into tyrannies, thus protecting our right to participate in representative government.  In the former calculation, the federal government having the power to make us buy healthcare is an inherent assault on liberty because it makes us (potentially) less personally free.  In the second calculation, the federal government being able to force us to buy healthcare is supportive of liberty, since it empowers the legislature, and it only harms liberty if that power helps give rise to tyrants (which isn’t to say it’s constitutional.  Obviously “how does this affect liberty” isn’t the only question you ask when determining the constitutionality of a law, under anyone’s jurisprudence).

So, originalists, beware “liberty!”  The founders meant two things by it, one of them is counterintuitive, both are in tension, and it is rarely clear which the founders were talking about without significant investigation (and maybe not even then).  Everyone else, if you see an originalist like Scalia appealing to “liberty” in a commerce clause case (IE, a clause that never uses the word), get very, very nervous.  He’s using a term with an unclear original meaning in a place he doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t).  That is suspicious.   

Libertarian Foot Fetish

By Robert H.

Ilya Somin has a post up arguing for the relative advantages of foot voting vs. ballot box voting.  The argument is drawn from his latest book, so see that for more.  I have two bones to pick with it.

1. Somin is missing, I think, the major critique of foot voting.  He says "I cover several standard objections to foot voting, the problem of moving costs, the danger of  'races to the bottom,' and the likelihood that political decentralization might harm unpopular racial and ethnic minorities."  But he misses the biggest problem with foot voting: it's hard to know what the hell people are voting for.

If a polity elects a politician, it's pretty clear that that happened because of what kind of politician she is.  Special interests or ignorant voters or wise crowds or whoever sat down and said, "this gal's going to a better job than the other guy," or at the very least "this gal belongs to the political team I belong to, and voting for her flatters my team pride."  Whatever the reasoning, the outcome is mainly a reflection of the selectorate's political calculations, political prejudices, political signaling, political whatever.   

But if I move to California, who the hell knows why I did it?  Maybe there's a gold rush.  Maybe I love the ocean.  Maybe I figure it's my last, best chance to be cast in a star trek film (these are presented from least to most likely).  But one thing is for dang sure, we can't know it's related to political anything. 

You can see this in demographics: our most populous states are New York (generally liberal government), Texas (generally conservative government), and California (generally incompetent government).  If good political policies determined foot voting, why are people voting for totally different political policies?  Or maybe your affinity for local politics, not political outcomes, determines foot voting.  In that case, why do huge minorities of republicans live in NYC or democrats live in Texas?  Or maybe Texas is attracting tons of migrants because of its good policies, and New York and California only retain large populations because some sort of population stickiness makes people stay in place.  Ok, but then won't population stickiness undermine the whole "we will get good policy when people vote with their feet" thing?  People won't vote with their feet, they'll just hang around where they live now.  Or maybe this only happens because the federal government is so much more important than state government that it fudges the outcome.  Ok, then, why haven't most Greeks moved to Germany?  

So all this adds up to a big problem.  If people move for lots of non-political reasons, relying on people moving as a way to determine political outcomes has problems.  The best policies in the world could fail to attract migrants for exogenous reasons, and the worst (ok, maybe not the worst) could take advantage of, say, a resource boom to attract lots of folks.  

***

2. Here and elsewhere, I think Somin has been too down on voting voting.  Yes, voters are ignorant.  Yes, they are rationally ignorant, since their vote will normally never matter.  Yes, the heuristics voters could be using ("reward incumbents when things are good" being a classical one) don't really get you to great government.

No, that does not mean democracy is useless.  High praise time: despite those and other political economy constraints, democracy is pretty good at keeping politicians from passing policies that are disastrous for most people.  For example, I'm pretty confident that a party running on an "enslave most of the voters" platform would not win.  Under a rationally ignorant voter model, if the Enslave Everyone party ever comes close to winning then the relative gains from paying attention and voting would go up and lots of voters would stop being ignorant.  Under a median voter model, the median voter would not want to be enslaved.  I could keep going through different models, but come on.  People will rarely vote themselves into slavery. 

That may seem like a really low bar, but it is not!  Human government has just been incredibly freaking awful over the centuries, ranging from the genocidal to the overly bellicose to the (and this is most common) widely extractive.  Governments *have* enslaved most of their people.  At the very least, almost all governments have made women second class citizens.  Any system of government that can avoid that stuff and routinely churn out merely bad policy is doing great.  A few special interests shaving off some GDP and GDP growth?  Possible national debt crisis in 20 years?  Weird predilection for subsidizing the old rather than the poor?  Yes please!  So much better than being a serf!

Point being, the least bad governments have gotten there through representative democracy, and there are theoretical reasons for functioning democracies to give us not-terrible policies, despite voter ignorance. Foot voting, on the other hand, has not been used as often to reach good political outcomes, and doubts about the ability of good policy to attract migrants seriously undermine the theoretical case for relying on foot voting.  

***

As I final point, I just want to be clear, if it is not obvious, that relying on voting and relying on foot voting are in tension.  For example, let's say you make American states autonomous power centers that can set their own policy because you want to create a world where people can move between them and foot vote.  Well, by necessity you just stripped folks of their ability to vote vote for a range of federal policies, namely those that would cut into state power.  

Why Do Libertarians Like Federalism? Why Does Anyone?

By Robert H.

I know why libertarians like government of limited powers: libertarians think government is an armed thug that forces people to do things at gunpoint, so they want to use it to force everyone to live in a minarchy at gunpoint.  The idea that the rest of us might have a right to have some sort of democratic say in how big government should be, or that democracy might by a better tool for ordering society than their personal whims and beliefs, can be dismissed.  After all, people keep voting for things libertarians dislike, so democracy must be wrong and need limits.*

But I don't get for one moment why libertarians are so into American federalism.  I honestly don't.

Here was the idea behind the constitution: government of near unlimited power with that power divided horizontally (executive, legislature, judiciary) and vertically (federal vs states).  The second division is federalism.  Theoretically it could work to avert tyranny (state and federal power will check each other) and promote limited government (if government gets too onerous in a state you can move, federal power can't get too onerous because it is limited).  

In reality state power was used to enslave people, institutionalize racism, and perpetuate corruption on a scale not even the federal government could match (Tammany Hall was not a national machine).  And states weren't even any more friendly to small government: during the lochner era we had the states desperately trying to create a nanny state and the federal judiciary just as frantically dismantling it.  It was the mirror image of what a pro-federalism libertarian might expect.

And yet libertarians act like federalism was a great idea.  I honesty don't get it.  "Unlimited power distributed vertically" is such a far cry from "limited power" that I don't see the theoretical appeal.  And the states have been so abusive of liberty historically that I don't get the appeal in practice.  Honestly I just do not get this.  Every scrap of American history seems to show that going back to a more federalist structure would just lead to fifty, worse run, more abusive little welfare states, not libertarian utopia.  We would be the EU, where citizens get to vote with their feet for exactly which kind of socialist (little s) state they prefer.  And if we were really lucky, some of those states would enslave millions of people again,

Man, f--- federalism.  Someone explain to me how anyone still embraces this terrible idea.

*Not to over-praise democracy.  It's dependent on good social norms, rights sometimes function in a counter-majoritarian way, and the iron triangle sucks and distorts democratic outcomes.  Libertarians can and do overemphasize these problems.

I Would Actually Endorse A Sting and the Police State

Young teacher, the subject of warrant-less scrutiny...

By Robert H.

The latest libertarian trend is to claim we live in a police state.  Popehat is doing it here.

First off, our criminal justice system is terrible and rife with human rights abuses.  It's worse than you think (216,000 prisoners are sexually abused a year!  Most by guards! 30,000 people in a solitary confinement regime that amounts to torture!  Racial bias controlling who goes to jail!  The flashy stuff (NSA spying, Gitmo, secret evidence, etc). It's awful!)  But it's not police state bad.  In a comments section (one I don't particularly recommend reading, the conversation is dull) I explained why I don't think we are a police state.  I am just going to copy and paste that here.  Check out the last paragraph for another fascist libertarian sighting:

Since I was asked, I will rejoin the conversation for one more post.  My dividing line for police state/not police state is "does the rule of law routinely constrain the government's exercise of police power."  In America, it clearly does. 

This is not to say that it always effectively constrains the police power.  There are failures -- too many.  But boy howdy does it *often* constrain police power.  Let's take an example from my criminal defense days (working for a criminal law attorney as a law student.  As an attorney I have never practiced criminal law) and think about a DWI arrest in the city I was then living in.  Does the rule of law constrain how this goes down?  Clearly.   

Things that will happen during the arrest and trial of our DWI defendant which the cops are only doing or allowing because of the rule of law.  IE, shit they do not want to do but will (if this list is too boring, just replace it with the words "lots of things"):

1. Record the entire stop on camera.
2. Not force the defendant to take a breathalyzer test if he refuses.  Alternately, they could pay a judge to stay up all night signing orders that let them force tests on people.  They never did the second option when I was there because it is too costly and judges hate it.
3. If the defendant agrees to a field sobriety test, the cop will call a special officer trained in the field sobriety test, wait for him to show up, and then the new cop will spend a few minutes very carefully giving the test in a way that will stand up to scrutiny (cases got overturned too often when they tried to train every cop in giving the test, so they went to this new system).
4. Stop questioning the defendant if he asks for an attorney (remember, they are on tape).
5. Let the defendant call an attorney.
6. Get the D before a magistrate to make a probable cause determination within 48 hours of the arrest.
7. Give the D a hearing where he can make the case for reasonable bail, with some protections on the setting of bail.
8. Give the defendant access to and a copy of that tape I've been talking about.
9. Give the D a trial.  A jury trial if he asks for it.
10. Give the D time and evidence to prepare for the trial.  Exclude improperly collected evidence from the trial.
11. Give the D a right for his attorney to show up at the trial.
12. Make the trial public.
13. Pay a lawyer to represent the D if he can't afford one.
14. Let the D go if he wins the trial.
15. Let my boss appeal the trial.  This initiates a new trial that is public, itself appeal-able, etc.
16. Let my boss file collateral attacks on the D's imprisonment if he loses the trial and is imprisoned, IE federal habeas motions.
17.  Limit the term of the D's custodial confinement and the amount he can be fined.
18. Etc, etc, etc.

The cops wants to do none of this.  It is a lot easier to just pull someone over, realize they are clearly drunk, get him to a judge when you feel like it, and have the judge assign whatever sentence seems to him fair (or that his political masters tell him to assign). All these other things either make imprisoning my client more costly, harder, or impossible, depending on the facts of the case.  These things let my then boss negotiate or win outcomes the state police and DA don't want.  Even better, if the governor or president decide they don't like this stuff, in most cases they would be shit out of luck.  Or they could stage a military coup, I guess. 

These are also not iron clad protections.  A drunk driver hating cop could pull over the defendant, turn off his dashboard camera, shoot the D, and maybe get off.  But then again, anyone could commit a crime anywhere and maybe get off.  As things stand, the practical upshot of all these legal protections is the state doing things it doesn't like and people spending less time in jail because of it. 

Lots of states don't have most of these protections.  A public trial, a trial so rigorous you have to film yourself if you hope to win it, a right to an attorney, an exclusionary rule, careful monitoring of how cops administer sobriety tests, the ability to refuse the breathalyzer test, etc. etc. etc.   It's just not there.  It's a lot more like the "cop decides you are guilty, judge believes him and gives you the punishment he feels like" procedure.  If there is a judge.  And they bother to give your sentence a definite term. And the cop bothered to see if you were actually guilty of a crime.

So that's the rule of law.

***
In bigger things as well the government is constrained by the rule of law.  Even in Gitmo, a shining example of our system at close to its worst, the defendants have routinely been able to force the executive to do things the executive does not want to do (IE, have congress establish a procedure for the status reviews, stop strip searching detainees before they meet with their lawyers, give detainees meaningful access to federal courts, etc.)  Obviously the rule of law has, in the main, failed at Gitmo.  But it has done way way better than it would in many many other states.   

So again, the state screws up all the time!  Badly!  America perpetrates terrible human rights abuses!  The rule of law does not effectively constrain some state actors at some times!  We are torturing, as you say, tens of thousands of prisoners in solitary confinement at any given time!  That sh-- is f---ing terrible.  But turning away from those abuses to the core of American life, the rule of law is still really active and really powerful here, if not as active and powerful as we would like.  In a police state, that is not true.  Things aren't mostly nice here because we have a mostly nice police state.  Things are mostly nice here because we don't have a police state, and the state's ability to be mean is mostly constrained..

As an aside, my own take on how I came to my views is not that I was brainwashed to love America, because I am not a nationalist and would defend a whole host of other human rights abusing states from the name "police state."  Instead, I would explain it this way: I've studied and worked in the American criminal justice system and I know how  bad it can be.  I also have a passion for international human rights law, and know  just how bad other countries can be.  The rule of law is strong here.  Elsewhere, it is nonexistent.  Those are the police states.  

Finally, if you can indulge a request of mine, please begin your next essay on the American police state by stating your beliefs that 1. America is just as bad as Nazi Germany, and 2. Human rights and the rule of law were respected for everyone in Nazi Germany's core territories except for the Jews.  Those two beliefs are the single most surprising and important things someone could know about your world view before they invest time in reading your essays.

Fascist Libertarians

by Robert H.

I continue to be worried by the trend of libertarians dismissing the idea that democracy might be, you know, good.  From Arnold Kling:

Lindberg also notices the hard-line stance of today’s left. This may be the key quote of the essay:

The notion of an invincibly center-right electorate was anathema to the emerging Left 3.0. A key moment in its reconciliation with the Democratic Party was the latter’s abandonment of policies designed with a center-right electorate in mind. For the foreseeable future, the party would lay claim to the center not on the basis of adopting positions to appease moderates and independents, but on the basis of winning more than 50 percent of the vote on election day for candidates congenial to Left 3.0 and garnering majority public support for positions congenial to Left 3.0.

I see this hard-line stance evident in the progressive’s resistance to any suggestion for reducing government spending. You cannot suggest cuts in the short run, because that would mean austerity. You cannot suggest trimming entitlement promises, because Social Security is sacred and control over health care spending is a job for technocrats.

The radical hardliners!  Claiming they should get to enact policies just because they win elections and have policies most people support!  What is this, some sort of representative democracy?

To be fair, this is really common in the "explain why the people who won the last election have novel strategies, an unstoppable political coalition, and will dominate politics forever" genre of writing.  "Unlike in the past, the people who won the last election have hit on the crazy idea of seeking majority support for their policies and candidates, then pushing those policies through while conceding as little as possible to the other side!"  Back under Bush, liberals were all complaining about how divisive Carl Rove's "50 percent plus 1" strategy was.  That was basically the same thing, "These mean old republicans are just trying to win elections and then pass the policies they like.  If they really cared about America they would make huge concessions to our policy positions for the sake of national unity."  Maybe!  Or, you know, we could let the majority rule so long as it respects human rights and our governmental institutions.

I'll let pass Kling's claim that Social Security is sacred to the new left, unfortunately made at the same time the President is calling for chained CPI as a policy concession democrats are willing to make for Republicans.

And my usual caveat: Arnold Kling is the person with whom I most disagree while still enjoying his writing, so I critically comment on his posts a lot.  I'm not trying to stir up some weird internet grudge or something.  Indeed, you can generally assume that if I *don't* write about one of his posts, I basically agreed with it.

Working for the Mandarin

By Robert H.

Oh boy, more misuse of historical analogy:

But I think that we are looking at something even deeper than that: the Mandarinization of America.  The Chinese imperial bureaucracy was immensely powerful. Entrance was theoretically open to anyone, from any walk of society—as long as they could pass a very tough examination. The number of passes was tightly restricted to keep the bureaucracy at optimal size.  Passing the tests and becoming a “scholar official” was a ticket to a very good, very secure life. And there is something to like about a system like this ... especially if you happen to be good at exams. Of course, once you gave the imperial bureaucracy a lot of power, and made entrance into said bureaucracy conditional on passing a tough exam, what you have is ... a country run by people who think that being good at exams is the most important thing on earth. Sound familiar?The people who pass these sorts of admissions tests are very clever. But they're also, as time goes on, increasingly narrow. The way to pass a series of highly competitive exams is to focus every fiber of your being on learning what the authorities want, and giving it to them. To the extent that the "Tiger Mom" phenomenon is actually real, it's arguably the cultural legacy of the Mandarin system.

To the state the obvious, there is a big difference between the ancient Chinese system, where the government selects elites by examination, and the American system, where the government and free market actors select elites by examination.  Most journalists are employeed by for profit organizations.  If all those organizations are hiring driven, smart grads from top universities, maybe those people make good employees.

Two caveats:

1.  Yes, via occupational licensing the government often requires that people have certain educational requirements, and that probably leads to over investment in education.  Maybe less than you would think, though: even in states that offer the traditional "go get on the job training" route to becoming a lawyer (California, for example), top law jobs are still staffed by top graduates from top schools.

2.  The basic point of that article is right, it *is* a real concern that low income children have difficulty cultivating the habits and resources needed to excel at these institutions.  But the solution is to subsidize and help them, not rail against institutions that seem to be providing an important market service.    Investing in future generations based on which children rich people love is a market failure, hiring Harvard grads is not.  Articles like this, which pretend that elite education is a scam foisted on America to create a ruling class, are stupid.

P.S.  Hat tip to Arnold Kling for the links.
P.P.S. Note that the second article exists firmly in the "we are obviously right, but we keep losing elections, therefor democracy is flawed" school of libertarian discourse.  It rails against one man one vote and, at the same time claims, our system is too oligarchic.  Awesome!  Fascist libertarians for the win!