Murray N. Rothbard, “Perot, the Constitution, and Direct Democracy” (1992)

This file is a single short polemical political-economic essay: chapter 30 from Making Economic Sense. Its scope is Ross Perot’s plan for electronic town meetings, but Rothbard uses that proposal to challenge the legitimacy of representative politics, party government, polling expertise, and establishment fiscal reform. His thesis is that representation was once a technological necessity; once mass direct voting becomes feasible, opposition to it reveals elite fear of popular control.

H. Ross Perot's proposal for direct democracy through "electronic town meetings" is the most fascinating and innovative proposal for fundamental political change in many decades.

Rothbard begins by treating the hostile reaction to Perot as more revealing than the proposal itself. Pollsters, media figures, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and party professionals appear as a class whose authority depends on managing public opinion rather than letting the public decide. The essay then reduces the controversy to a deliberately simple question.

What exactly is the argument against electronic direct democracy?

He reconstructs the standard answer: direct democracy suited small colonial towns, but scale forced citizens to delegate decision-making to representatives. Rothbard accepts this only as a historical explanation, not as a permanent democratic principle. Once telephones, television, computers, and interactive media exist, the old justification for representation no longer holds.

Well, technology rolls on, and direct voting has, for a long while, since the age of telephone and television, much less of the computer and emerging “interactive” television, been technologically feasible.

That technological claim supports the essay’s central conceptual reversal. The establishment praises democracy, deplores apathy, and urges participation, yet recoils when participation might become binding and direct. Rothbard’s rhetorical questions are therefore analytic instruments: they expose, in his view, the contradiction between democratic rhetoric and institutional self-preservation.

Could it be that—for all their prattle about “democracy,” for all their ritualistic denunciation of voter “apathy” and call for voter participation—that more participation is precisely what the elites don’t want?

The constitutional argument is similarly deflated. Rothbard insists that the two-party system is not constitutionally sacred and that appeals to constitutional propriety often protect the entrenched bipartisan order rather than liberty. Perot matters because he disrupts managed choice: the public is offered not real alternatives, but a ritual contest between factions of the same political class.

The sharpest move comes when Rothbard identifies the only remaining objection: voters might decide badly. But if this is a valid objection to voting directly on issues, it is also an objection to voting for officials who decide those issues. Anti-plebiscitary caution thus becomes, in his hands, an anti-democratic argument.

The only possible argument against direct democracy, now that the technological argument is obsolete, is that the public’s choices would be wrong.

The final section turns from political form to fiscal substance. Rothbard praises Perot’s proposed constitutional amendment requiring direct voter approval before Congress could raise taxes. This is where the essay’s libertarian purpose is clearest: electronic democracy is valuable chiefly as a check on the taxing and spending state.

And speaking of the Constitution, Perot has called for a Constitutional amendment that would prohibit Congress from raising taxes unless such a proposal were ratified by electronic direct voting.

Against this, Rothbard attacks the establishment balanced-budget amendment as theatrical reform: a budget balanced only in projections, with exceptions and off-budget evasions, would merely preserve congressional discretion. The essay’s relevance lies in its anticipation of later debates over digital democracy, technocracy, party duopoly, and populist distrust of institutions. Rothbard’s core move is to make technological change invalidate representation’s old rationale, then interpret elite resistance as evidence that official democracy tolerates participation only when it cannot threaten power.