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"Democratic" decision making is a means for finding and implementing the will of the majority; it has no other function. It serves, not to encourage diversity, but to prevent it.

— David Friedman The Machinery of Freedom (1973)

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Democracy

More quotes by David Friedman

Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that people have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them.

The tendency to be rational is the consistent and hence predictable element in human behavior. (p.4)

I predict that, if anarcho-capitalist institutions appeared in this country tomorrow, heroin would be legal in New York and illegal in most other places. (p.128)

Legal rules are to be judged by the structure of incentives they establish and the consequences of people altering their behavior in response to those incentives (p.11)

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations. (p.4)

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: David Friedman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.