Friedrich Hayek once said that living under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile was better than living under the democracy of Salvador Allende. For someone like Hayek, who was known to believe very strongly in the liberal freedom of speech, action, property, and so on, it is a bit of a shock. However, there is an explanation -- an explanation that makes sense even.
Hayek's underlying point here was that pure and total democracy does not lead to freedom and liberty. Someone might persuade the electorate to do away with freedom and liberty. If only the will of the people is to be considered, and only in what they say at election time, then the underlying rules of the society that allow those freedom and liberty could be bypassed, overruled, and so on.
He thought that Allende -- especially but not only -- in the economic arena was doing that. He further thought that while Pinochet was indeed a military dictator, and no lover of free speech, he was overall better on those issues of freedom and liberty.
We can argue that either way, and that isn't the issue I want to point to. Rather, the distinction itself is what I do want to point to. Democracy is that the will of the people prevails as expressed at election time. Freedom and liberty are not the same thing.
To take a trivial example, in my native Britain, anyone who proposed a law that paedophiles would be executed would probably win such a vote. But Britain also says that we don't have capital punishment at all because that's incompatible with civil liberty. Either of those ideas could be right or wrong, but they do clash to a certain clamour.
The point is that civil liberty and democracy are not the same thing. For the people might -- and observably do at times -- vote for things which are not compatible with that civil liberty. There's thus that tension. Which is something we have to remember when we're told this: “Tarique Rahman has said democracy is not just about holding elections but about ensuring people’s freedom and fundamental rights.”
This is not quite true. Democracy is indeed the system whereby the people get to choose. But freedom and fundamental rights are where individuals get to choose, which is where tension comes in with what people decide collectively -- the democracy part.
This might come across as nitpicking, but it's a vital point. Misunderstanding it leads to misunderstanding Hayek, for example. He thought a society not subject to socialist planning -- where one may work where, doing what, for which wages -- was one with greater liberty and freedom than one subject to that socialism.
Both democracy and liberty are important. But at times they will pull in opposite directions, for that democracy can be illiberal at times. My own formulation would be to have as much democracy as is consistent with still having liberty, but that's -- again -- one that can be argued
We can also only very slightly alter Rahman's statement to cater to this. A good society has both democracy and freedom, and fundamental rights for the people. But even that's not a subtle difference. For the really big question then becomes, well, when the two conflict, which gets to win?
As with Hayek, I'm usually on the liberty, not the democracy, side, even as I agree that that can end up in some very odd places. But whichever our answer, the base idea is still valid. That grand question of whether a democratic decision unduly restricts liberty, then which wins, the vote or the freedom?
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.