DemocracyThe God That Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

constitutional and administrative law) not merely as law but as a "higher" law, a gradual erosion of private law ensues; that is, there is an increasing subordination and displacement of private law by and through public law. 28
    See also Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1992); idem, The Mystery of Banking (New York: Richardson and Snyder, 1983); on the history of interest rates Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla, A History of Interest Rates (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), esp. chap. 23, pp. 553-58.
    28 In fact, although undermined by the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolutions, throughout the monarchical age the notion prevailed that kings and their subjects were ruled by a single, universal law—"a code of rules anterior to and co-existent with the sovereign—rules which were intangible and fixed" (de Jouvenel, Sovereignty, p. 193). Law was considered something to be discovered and recognized as eternally "given," not something to be "made." It was held "that law could not be legislated, but only applied as something that had always existed," (Bernhard Rehfeld, Die Wurzeln des Rechts [Berlin 1951], p. 67). Indeed, as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert V. Dicey (Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century [London: Macmillan, 1903]) could still maintain that as for Great Britain, public or administrative law, as distinct from private law, did not exist: government agents, in their relationship with private citizens, were still regarded as bound by the same rules and subject to the same laws as any private citizen. It is again only after World War I, under democratic republicanism, that public agents achieve "immunity" from the provisions of private law, and that a view such as the leading socialist legal-theorist Gustav Radbruch's found general acceptance: that

    Rather than upholding private law among the nongovernment public and exploiting its legal monopoly solely for the purpose of redistributing wealth and income from civil society onto itself, a government "ruled" by public law will also employ its power increasingly for the purpose of legislation, i.e., for the creation of new, "positive" civil law, with the intent of redistributing wealth and income within civil society. For as a government's caretaker (not owner) it is of little or no concern that any such redistribution can only reduce future productivity. Confronted with popular elections and free entry into government, however, the advocacy and adoption of redistributive policies is predestined to become the very prerequisite for anyone wanting to attain or retain a government caretaker position. Accordingly, rather than representing a "consumption state" (as the typical monarchy does), with public government ownership, complementing and reinforcing the overall tendency toward rising taxes (and/or inflation), government employment and debt, the state will become increasingly transformed into a "welfare state." 29 And contrary to its typical portrayal as a "progressive" development, with this transformation the virus of rising degrees of time preference will be planted in the midst of civil society, and a self-accelerating process of decivilization will be set in motion. 30
    for an individualistic order of public law, the state, is only the narrow protective belt surrounding private law and private property. In contrast, for a social [democratic republican] order of law private law is to be regarded only as a provisional and constantly decreasing range of private initiative, temporarily spared within the all-comprehensive sphere of public law. (DerMensch im Recht [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck, 1957], p. 40)
    In the meantime,
    in our own day we are used to having our rights modified by the sovereign decisions of legislators. A landlord no longer feels surprised at being compelled to keep a tenant; an employer is