There are three reasons why I believe that the most urgent and important goal for Ukrainians would be liberation from democracy at the earliest opportunity and transition to a republic. The first is that such a transition would either prevent the collapse of the current democratic and redistributive state or mitigate its consequences, providing a foundation for sustained growth. The second is that transition to the republic would also help avoid revolution—that is, a restart of the current model under new packaging, prolonging its agony at the expense of the initial trust revolutionaries enjoy. The third is that while both democracy and the republic are versions of the state—that is, fundamentally flawed systems—the republic has one crucial advantage: it encompasses practices that differ from, and are often opposite to, democratic ones. I consider practice a far more effective instrument of change than propaganda. People who adopt republican practices find it much easier to understand how one can do without the state altogether. All the more so because a new republic should learn from the mistakes of the old ones. I therefore view the republic as a desirable stage on the path to a self-organizing society.
Well, now let me try to explain what I mean.
It Is All About Emphasis
To avoid political science blah-blah-blah and invoking Aristotle for nothing, let us define democracy as majority rule. Decisions approved by a majority vote are legitimate.
A republic is a “common thing.” That is, the republic singles out something “common,” leaving everything else to the private and personal. The law is understood as such a “common” thing.
Of course, both in a republic and in a democracy you will find elections, legislative, executive, and judicial authorities, and other state apparatus. Their difference lies in emphasis, but these emphases are more than fundamental.
In a democracy, any decision is legitimate as long as it has majority approval. Hitler was a typical product of democracy. In a republic, the law applies not only to citizens but above all limits the state. State expenditures in a republic relate solely to maintaining the state—courts, the apparatus of violence, and bureaucracy. No one would imagine the state spending money on various forms of “social assistance” or, worse, “state investments.” The idea of a republic as common law does not provide for such functions. The idea of democracy, by contrast, in no way limits state functions or methods.
In a rough approximation, a republic can be defined as equality before the law, and democracy as equality of votes in elections.
Erroneous Borrowing
Propaganda, and mainstream political science as well, tries to identify democracy and the republic, or more precisely, to attribute to democracy the characteristic features of the republic. The republic appears only as a “form of government,” the opposite of which is supposedly monarchy.
However, the identification of democracy with the republic is a very recent development. Relatively recently, the difference between a republic and a democracy was well understood. Classics such as Locke and Montesquieu did not favor democracy. The founding fathers of the USA did not favor it either. Democracy is mentioned neither in the US Constitution nor in the constitutions of the states. And this was not accidental. Americans long considered their system a republic, not a democracy.
The emphasis began to shift along with the growth of the state. Politicians started speaking more about democracy than about the republic to justify state interventionism. I remind you that the republic presupposes only joint maintenance of the law, but by no means diverse costly projects for “improving” society. Therefore, “republican values” are poorly suited for populism that helps win elections—or rather, republicanism inevitably becomes a conservative ideology opposing democratic interventionism.
As a result, you will almost never find the republic mentioned in the rhetoric of modern politicians. Nothing but democracy reigns supreme.
Modern developed states can with full justification be called “states of triumphant democracy,” and their residents are engaged in the exciting process of “who will outvote whom in the struggle for other people’s money.” Almost nothing of the republic has remained there. Meanwhile, it is the republican system, or more precisely, the possibility for people to build their own lives relying on naturally emerged institutions, that is the cause of Western wealth.
Instead of the republic, Ukraine borrowed a system of distributive democracy, and we see a society deprived by Soviet dictatorship of the skills of self-organization and resistance to state pressure sinking ever deeper into lawless chaos. We erroneously perceived Western democracy as a result of progress and the cause of Western prosperity, whereas Western prosperity is conditioned by a strong—still—civil society, and democracy itself is an unequivocal step backward, a degradation of the republic.
From Democracy to the Republic
I view the republic not as some predetermined state, but as a natural instrument for reducing the state. That is, it makes no sense to invent a ready-made form and try to force it onto current democracy; one must consider the transition to the republic as a process, and this process itself as the achievement of fundamentally important systemic changes that could, on one hand, prevent the spread of chaos, lawlessness, and poverty, and on the other, become a bridge to a future self-organizing society.
These important systemic changes are easy to identify if we recall that both democracy and the republic are varieties of the state. The state, however, is an instrument for collecting tribute, nothing more. The state exists for the collection of taxes—not the other way around, that taxes exist to “fulfill the functions of the state” which allegedly cannot be financed in any other way.
That is, the conceptual systemic changes lie in the sphere of taxation, the formation and distribution of the budget, and, accordingly, the political opportunities to influence this process.
Anesthesia
The state that needs to be overcome is actually the state of democratic confusion on these fundamental issues. The goal of the democratic state is to fill its coffers in order to distribute them among interested groups. Therefore, democracies—especially those like Ukraine’s that are not limited by traditions and civil society—strive to make taxation as convoluted as possible and maximize the difficulty of understanding who gives to the state and who receives from it. For this purpose, democracies also strive to maximize the number of voters, declaring the opportunity to vote a “right.”
Democracies have created a kind of “anesthesia” that makes state robbery imperceptible. This “anesthesia” consists of indirect taxes, taxation of legal entities, inflation, and state loans.
Anesthesia has one important property—it changes people’s political behavior. Since the robbery proceeds imperceptibly, it is impossible to assess the realism of state activity. In the perception of the overwhelming majority, money at the state appears “by itself,” and the connection between this money and taxes and other extortions seems purely speculative. Therefore, the state appears capable of implementing any projects, and the majority quite rationally associates all hopes not with their own efforts, but with the office that appears truly omnipotent. Thus it is quite natural that the Ukrainian political agenda for the past twenty years has been the search for a good tsar—one capable of turning into reality the wild fantasies of Ukrainians, fantasies to which they indulge under the influence of “anesthesia.” Accordingly, the problem in this agenda is not a bad system, but bad actors: “corrupt officials,” “Muscovites,” and so on.
Long-standing habits, the nonstop laments of politicians and journalists have confused in public consciousness the robbers and their victims. For example, various beneficiaries—“doctors and teachers”—are in the camp of robbers, but are presented as victims.
And finally, “anesthesia” and the hallucinations it causes are an excellent way to preserve the system, directing dissatisfaction into a revolutionary channel—that is, toward a reboot of the machine with the old content under new slogans.
In general, everything is done so that the celebration of “power” on the street, whoever embodies it, would last forever. Meanwhile, anesthesia, although it makes each person’s damage imperceptible, by no means cancels it. Ukrainians work for the state 217 days a year, and this is only part of the damage. The damage “under anesthesia” is greater because the individual does not take measures to protect themselves, and, worse still, having the right to vote, is often ready to vote for increasing doses of anesthesia rather than for stopping the robbery.
Republic 2.0
If we want to stop society’s self-destruction, we must ensure that the damage from the state affects individual practice and is therefore realized by each person. “Anesthesia” must be mercilessly eliminated. The same can be expressed differently: in order to evaluate the “common,” each person must pay for it themselves. The goal of the republic is financing the “common thing,” therefore the method by which this is done must be maximally transparent and understandable to each person who constitutes this “common.”
I said that the systemic changes necessary for the transition from democracy to the republic lie in the sphere of taxes, the budget, and voting in elections.
The most important, certainly, is taxation. It should be said that the economic meaning of all varieties of taxes without exception is one—fiscal. They have no other meaning whatsoever. It is economically impossible to have either “consumption taxation” or other refinements of governmental economists such as the “stimulating” (!!) role of taxes (only specific incentives for tax evasion and specific consequences of these incentives arise). In the final analysis, all taxes are paid only by individuals, and they have no other content except the seizure of part of your property in favor of the state. Therefore, nothing terrible will happen if instead of an endless list of taxes there exists only one single tax.
That is, the ultimate goal is a state where each person pays a single tax for the “common thing.” There should be no indirect taxes whatsoever, nor should there be taxation of legal entities.
The second—budgetary—point is a clear separation of donors and recipients. If a person receives income from the budget (is an official, a military serviceman, receives benefits, etc.)—they do not pay tax.
The third—political—point is that the payment of tax gives the right to vote in elections. That is, budget recipients do not have the right to vote.
And Further
Any state strives for expansion, and this process cannot be stopped, which means that sooner or later a republic becomes a democracy and so on. Separation of powers, bureaucratic “checks and balances,” state “guarantees” of citizens’ rights—as the experience of the greatest republic, the USA, shows—are not capable of stopping the process of state expansion and therefore its suppression of society. Therefore, as I have already said, the republic should be viewed as a means of reducing the state, not as an end in itself.
Taking into account the mistakes of old republics, the new republic must incorporate a mechanism for the most obvious connection between the amount of tax a citizen pays and state expenditures. For example, one could stipulate that the amount of tax each voter pays is their share in state expenditures. That is, budget expenditures are divided by the number of taxpayers, and the sum owed by each for the “common thing” is obtained. Thus, elections (which should obviously take place much more frequently, for example, once every two years) turn into competition of future budgets. Since everyone is interested in paying less, politicians, in order to win elections, will have to fight for a smaller—and not a larger, as is happening everywhere now—budget. Again, the state loses the incentive to resort to loans, since loans can be repaid only by increasing the tax amount. And again, all incentives arise for the natural replacement of current state monopolies—healthcare, education, courts, law enforcement, etc.—with private activity, the gradual exclusion of an increasing number of social functions from the sphere of the “common thing.”
However, most important, in my view, are republican practices. The problem of our “public consciousness” is that it still struggles with the thought that any “common good” can be broken down into private components. Practice will undoubtedly help best with this. When a person directly, personally, pays to the state for the “common thing”—and understands that this is the only source of state income—they always have an incentive to consider what volume of this is needed and whether it is needed at all.
P.S. Experience shows that Ukrainians suffer from an inexplicable—for me—craving for all kinds of details and specifics. Since the organization of the political machine that will work to reduce expenditures rather than increase them raises the most questions, I will have to say a few words about this.
The constitution of the republic may look approximately like this:
Only one tax, equal for everyone. Before elections, parties publish budgets and the amount of tax owed by each.
Exclusively party-based elections. One can introduce the principle of relative majority, when the party that received the highest percentage itself forms the government, and the rest remain in opposition. One can also keep the old principle of parliamentary coalition, but we must understand the consequences.
Obviously, the president is eliminated as unnecessary. Executive power is formed by the winning party.
The term of parliament is two years, eventually, with the transition to full electronic voting—one year. Actually, before elections, parties also present the state budget for the term of the government (one or two years).
Taxes are collected after the formation of the government. The technical details of this matter can be the most varied. Perhaps it would be advisable to fix budget dates in the constitution.
Thus, political struggle is reduced to taking from each person as little as possible. The task of the winning party is to collect the budget; the task of the opposition is to show how bad it is. Politicians will have no time left for harmful activities such as lawmaking, and this is good. And, of course, I will remind that we are talking about a republic, not a democracy—that is, the “majority” here is a technical moment, a method of decision-making in certain situations, and not some sacred cow. After the elections I will describe in more detail how one should move toward the republic.
Yes, and regarding the oligarchs who pay like everyone else (supposedly being poor). Generally speaking, were it my will, I would take more from the “poor,” because it is precisely the “poor” who suffer most from lawlessness and whine about it. The law is needed by the “poor,” not by oligarchs. Our “poor” constantly try to force oligarchs to pay for the law that the “poor” need. The result of this practice will be only further improvement, and the result conceptually cannot be different. So, if you believe that oligarchs should pay more—continue in the same spirit and enjoy the consequences. Those who are not satisfied with the consequences should think about the reasons, and, ultimately, come to the conclusion that for the “common thing” each must pay himself an equal share.