If one wants to make peace, then one must get rid of the possibility of conflicts between peoples. Only the ideas of liberalism and democracy have the power to do that.The nineteenth-century variety of liberalism facilitates social cooperation and voluntary exchange. By contrast, democracy, in the context of a mass society, has led to the development of a technocratic regime that nominally respects property rights but micromanages human behavior through the gradual establishment of bureaucratic diktats and uses a welfare state to buy off the population. Central banking and a sizable warfare state are also features of this omnipotent state, which formed, not coincidentally, during the consolidation of mass democracy in the twentieth century. In fairness to Mises, he was a man of his time. He pragmatically viewed democracy as the lesser of two evils on a war-torn European continent that was dotted with monarchies and nascent nationalist movements that were embracing collectivist ideologies. However, democracy has outlived its usefulness and cannot contain the torrential wave of statism proliferating across the West. Going back to romanticized eras of the past is not an option. We must move forward and blaze a new path to a more just society based on private property and freedom of association. The jurist Carl Schmitt once said that “a historical truth is only true once.” Fostering an embrace of laissez-faire liberalism is always valuable because it places some limits on what a regime can get away with. But history suggests it is not enough to rely only on ideological bulwarks. It is perhaps time to think bigger, and we can do so by drawing from one of the more underappreciated aspects of Mises’s life’s work. Namely, his focus on radical decentralization. This can come in the form of nullification, soft secessionism, localism, and other forms of breaking down centralized power. The challenge before us is to cobble together a decentralized alternative that builds on the positive aspects of the previous liberal order while rectifying its flaws to forge a new architecture of ordered liberty and voluntary association. Thinking beyond traditional modes of political organization will be the key challenge as Westerners navigate through the uncharted waters of woke despotism. Radical decentralization will be the lighthouse for Western countries that have lost their way. Whether these countries correct course remains to be seen. Read more at: Mises.org
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