%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% THE INITIATIVE PROCESS - A CAVEAT By Jim Peron %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ====================================================================== The This article appeared in the Summer/1992 issue of Freedom Network News -- the newsletter of the International Society for Individual Liberty. ====================================================================== Libertarians currently seem to be involved with a new political fad: initiatives. Few, However, appear to have given much thought as to whether or not initiatives are inherently pro-individual rights. Though I have written and worked on two successful California initiatives, I consider the initiative idea to be a dangerous concept and a major stumbling-block to a free society. Some libertarians have proposed the initiative concept as the ultimate standard of a free society: instead of being ruled by politicians, the people rule themselves. But this is a myth. Instead of being ruled by politicians I, the individual, am ruled by a mob. The initiative process is nothing more than direct democracy, and the only difference between direct democracy and a dictatorship is the number of feet on your throat. Proponents of direct democracy engage in a major fallacy when they arg the people rule themselves instead of being ruled by politicians. Instead of being methodological individualists, they banter about purely collectivist terms and concepts. The "people", meaning the great collective don't rule themselves. Instead the collective rules the individual. The individual still has his or her rights subjected to the approval of a great mass of people, which can very easily become little more than a glorified lynch mob. In the United States the great libertarians who helped put together the Constitution and Bill of Rights were not unaware of the direct democracy proposal. They were quite aware of the concept, and rejected it as a dangerous assault on the rights of the individual and as being contrary to the fundamental principles of natural liberty. To them democracy was two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. James Madison noted that: "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and con ; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." Sam Adams said, "Remember, Democracy never last long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide." Alexander Hamilton specifically addressed those who said that "direct democracy" was the best form of government: "Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracy in which the people themselves rule never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure disformity." British statesman Benjamin Disraeli also warned that, "If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy . . . You will find in due season your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete." Oscar Wilde was as usual more candid -- and certainly more entertaining. Democracy, he said "is the bludgeoning of the people, for the people, by the people." The great French libertarian Frederic Bastiat once wrote that "The State is the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the everyone else's expense." In the century and a half since Bastiat first stated that eternal truth, things have not changed very much. Politics is still a method by which some confiscate the wealth or rights of others for their own purposes. Under rare and specific circumstances the opposite may be true; for instance a Libertarian may run for office to help abolish t ice -- but the bulk of candidates run for office for reasons quite contrary. On a whole, all political systems deny individual liberty and are contrary to true free markets. The two major methods by which the political process operates are what I call "legislative law" and "initiative law." Legislative laws are those rules and regulations which are imposed via parliaments, state assemblies, congresses, etc. Initiative laws are those rules and regulations passed by that select and limited group of individuals known as "the people." The differences between these two systems and the implications they have for libertarians will help us to understand where we should stand se methods of legislating. Legislative law is passed by relatively small bodies of elected individuals. They do not represent all the people nor can they represent all the people. On the other hand, initiatives are voted on by a relatively small group of individuals, sometimes as low as 10% of the population. Voters must meet certain unlibertarian standards before they are allowed to vote. They must be recognized by the State as "citizens" of the jurisdiction. In Kuwait only a tiny percentage of residents qualify as "cit since the government doesn't want the majority of residents to vote on its proposals. In South Africa the various black tribes were denied "citizenship" and thus the country could still claim to be democratic in nature. In the United States millions of residents, people who pay taxes and work for a living, are denied the "right" to vote because 1) they crossed an imaginary border without the permission of the State, 2. they have been convicted of breaking some rule that the State imposed, 3.) they don't m eet arbitrary age regulations, 4.) they haven't lived in a specific locale for a specific period of time, 5.) the government screwed up and lost their registration, etc. In California, the state plagued with initiatives, the bulk of the people affected by the proposals don't vote and indeed many of them can't vote. This is one of the reasons why governments love to conscript people as soon as they turn 18 years of age, but do not allow them to vote until sligh tly later. A person can literally be conscrip ted before he is allowed to vote for the politicians who conscripted him. Legislative law has a tendency to confiscate the wealth and rights of the majority on behalf of a specific minority. Thus a tariff may be passed on all the people, to transfer wealth to a small group of people or a tax may be passed on everyone to subsidize the lifestyle of a minority. The reason that legislatures act on behalf of organized minorities against the interests of the majority is clear. Wealth which is redistributed is concentrated on the special interest group, while the cost of the ibution is diffused over all of the people. Tobacco farmers in the United States receive millions and millions of dollars in redistributed wealth via government programs. They know that a big investment in time and money on behalf of such a program will reap greater benefits in the near future. For them to contribute large amounts of cash to political campaigns or to hire lobbyists is an investment -- and since the return far exceeds the costs it is a good investment indeed. But t he poor taxpayer has almost no incentive to do the same thin cost of the program is diffused so thoroughly that each taxpayer will only lose a few dollars if the program is passed. To contribute a large sum of money to a political campaign far exceeds the savings accrued if the program is defeated. The taxpayers loses money if he opposes the program and thus is very unlikely to take much of an interest in legislative law. This process is repeated time after time. Special-interest groups spend resources as an investment in politics to reap later and greater rewards. The majority of the people recognize that opposition to each specific proposal is more costly than the proposal itself and do nothing. Thus government grows and grows and the people become poorer and poorer. It is also clear that when a small group benefits from some proposal, it is usually easy to identify that group and to organize them into an effec litical machine to accomplish their goal of plundering their neighbors. But the taxpayers who foot the bill are a very large group and it is much more difficult to organize them on a specific piece of legislation, especially since the incentive process works against this type of organization. But this is exactly what initiatives are supposed to cure, say the proponents of this concept. And they are correct, in a very limited way. An initiative process would make it more difficult for organized minorities to confiscate the wealth of the majority. On the other hand initiatives have the opposite tendency: they allow the majority to confiscate the wealth of the minority! For libertarians this is not a viable alternative. Theft is theft whether the minority steals from the majority or th ity steals from the minority. For example, California is still suffering under a pernicious initiative which "reformed" the insurance industry. This measure was proposed by a small group of wacko radicals who supported government confiscation of private industry. They wisely picked just one group to attack, the insurance industry, and thus limited the size of the opposition. They also wrote a clause into the initiative which would allow voters to vote on whether or not to cut their own insurance premiums! Thus they appealed majority to save themselves hundreds of dollars by voting "yes" on this massive new bureaucratic system of anti-capitalist regulations. The insurance industry fought the initiative, but the number of voters paying for insurance exceeded the number of voters who worked for insurance companies. Thus the deck was stacked. This law represented a wholesale confiscation of rights and wealth, and it passed because the initiative process tends to support these types of rights violations. Most initiatives proposed in California are this type of proposal. Initiatives that benefit the majority -- whether or not they are ethically moral or politically corrupt -- tend to pass. The incentives in the initiative system are such that the bulk of the people are turned into looters. Under legislative law, the people become sacrificial cows; under the initiative system they become corrupt gangs of robbers. You tell me which is morally preferable. Another major problem exists with proposals of direct democracy. Some economists have presented an argument called "the rationally ignorant voter theory". This theory is really rather simple, but its ramifications for direct democracy are staggering. According to this theory the bulk of voters are "rationally ignorant" about the matters on which they are to vote. Voters realize that the odds of their vote actually changing an election are virtually nil. Since they realize their vote is not goin ange anything, they are not likely to invest the time and effort necessary to make an "informed" decision. There's no such thing as a "free" informed decision; they require energy and effort. In other words they require a rather hefty investment with virtually no return. As a result, few voters bother to inform themselves. The "rationally ignorant voter" will therefore tend to vote according to commonly-accepted ideas -- whether or not they are true. We must remember that politicians are elected by the voters and yet our rights are under constant attack by these people. If the people are willing to vote "indirectly" for the destruction of individual liberty, why do advocates of direct democracy assume these same voters will suddenly change their voting patterns and become pro-freedom. Instead most voters will vote ng to the myths that so many people have come to believe, myths like: rising prices are the cause -- not the result of inflation; free trade destroys local jobs; public-works projects create jobs; minimum wages help people; government should provide "free" (health care, food, police protection, schooling, libraries, etc.). What then is the answer, presuming we have a political system at all? The best solution I can find is to use both systems to counteract the viciousness of the other. If legislative law tends to confiscate the wealth and rights of the majority for the benefit of the minority and if initiative law tends to confiscate the wealth and rights of the minority for the benefit of the majority, it would seem we could devise a means by which the two systems cancel each other out. And that is why I propose w all "The People's Veto." Under this proposal, any individual or group of individuals would be able to organize a petition drive to repeal any measure passed by the legislature. After meeting a requirement of a minimum number of signatures, the measure would be placed on the ballot. All measures would be required to be worded simply: "Shall the [specific law to be repealed] be repealed?" Nothing more need be on the ballot itself. Since the legislatures will always be in the pockets of special interest groups, we will continue to be plagued by special-interest legislation that works against the rights of the individual and a free and prosperous society. But each measure passed by the legislature could at any time be repealed by the people themselves. So while the measures passed by the legislature will tend to confiscate the wealth of the majority, the majority will always have the right to say no! But it is important that itiative process be limited strictly to that of a veto, and that the people not be allowed to use this power to introduce or propose their own legislative measures. Under such a proposal, the legislature will have a difficult time using its powers to take away the rights of the majority, but the majority will also be devoid of the power to confiscate the rights of the minority. A people's veto can be another important check in a system where government power is limited and individual libert y is maximized. This is the only way I can find that the initiative process can be used to extend individual liberty on a consistent and regular basis. Currently the majority of initiatives do just the opposite and these violations of human rights are passed into law on a regular basis. A people's veto will help counteract this tendency.