Throughout the world, democracy is as often a cover for tyranny as it is a protection for liberty. Many countries call themselves “democracies” and have regular elections, yet systematically oppress their own people. Whatever its virtues, democracy is not freedom. As the 19th Century French philosopher Alexis d’Toqueville warned in his classic Democracy In America, a democracy can be just as tyrannical as a dictatorship once the voters decide to vote themselves money from the treasury.
Democracy is a method of deciding who shall rule. It does not determine the morality of the resulting government. At best, democracy means that the government has popular support. But popular support is no guarantee that the government will protect your freedom.
Democracy means you get to vote in the public sector; freedom means you get to determine the terms of your interactions with others in the private sector. Freedom and democracy are different. Democracy addresses how affairs in the public sector will be conducted. Democracy is greater when individuals vote on those matters assigned to the public sector. On the other hand, freedom is concerned with the relationships among people in the private sector. Freedom means individuals may choose how to interact on a voluntary basis outside the purview of the state.
Looking at the information we can gauge the fact that democracy and freedom both go hand in hand because without democracy freedom cannot survive. And without freedom democracy is nothing but autocracy. Hence, both are compatible with each other, one is for the other.
It is important to remember that democracy, in essence, is merely a mechanism for peaceful selection of political officeholders and it has often been said that democracy replaces bullets with ballots.
Freedom is the most basic and essential part of democracy. China is neither a democratic country nor it gives freedom to its citizens and even if the citizens in China have freedom on the individual level, they could not exercise it because ultimately the government has right over the citizen’s lives.
It is tempting for outsiders to assume that this clash between democracy and freedom is a problem unique to Muslim countries with Islamist political parties. But that is not true. In Sri Lanka at the moment, an elected government is busily undermining the independence of the courts and the freedom of the press.
Once an elected government is overthrown the citizens are in the business of repression. And that means censorship, rounding up political opponents and, quite often, shooting people in the streets. Democracy and freedom are not the same things. But overthrowing a democracy tends to lead to the same, sad destination. The task of government is to secure the individual in his freedom from violence and coercive interference, to protect his life, liberty, and property from aggression. When it goes beyond this his liberty has been abridged, even when that government is democratically chosen.
In a democracy, if most voters support freedom of speech, press, religion, association, and enterprise, their elected government will probably respect such freedoms.
While democracy doesn’t guarantee either freedom or peace, there are many historical examples of societies that didn’t have either elections or legislatures, but in which people’s rights were strongly protected.
To have a free and peaceful world, we must create societies in which the inalienable rights of the individual are again respected, and the powers of government are strictly limited. And it means ceasing government spying on its own citizens and ending foreign invasions to impose “democracy” by force.
No, democracy is not the same as liberty. All too often, building “democracy” has been used as a justification for destroying freedom.
To achieve a free and peaceful world, we must restore freedom and individual liberty, not democracy.