Victors in civil wars are cruel and vindictive; their revenge is merciless. (History knows only one exception: the behavior of the Northerners after Appomattox.)

That’s because they had already extracted their revenge on the march through Georgia. Any leftover cruelty held in the Union government was then taken out on the Plains Indians.

This essay seems essentially pro-democracy (not to mention pro-Lincoln). For any readers new to mises.org, I would point them to Hoppe’s Democracy – The God That Failed for a more penetrating examination of democracy. Briefly, the problem is not a lack of democrats as implied by Mises, but that democratic leaders are just as prone to greed as any other human being. Because the nature of democracy is that governments survive relatively briefly and power is not automatically conferred on one’s descendants, it means that ordinary human greed is given an extreme urgency when democratic power is being exercised. The time in which a democratic leader can use his or her power for their own benefit is typically no more than 4 to 10 years. After that, all power and responsibility ceases.

That is why the current governments of the USA and Europe have little interest in ceasing the printing and borrowing of money even though they know fully well it is a form of collective suicide for the nation – as a whole. The fact is, a democratic leader or top bureaucrat is no longer a member of “the whole”. The existence of the extreme power they wield means that they can ensure that huge fortunes will accrue into their hands and into the hands of their closest friends, and this fortune is more than enough insulation from all of the worst possible upheavals that could occur when the ship of state crashes into the rocks some time after they have retired from office.

Consider the case of a retired president or prime minister. They have a gold-plated pension and often a secret slush fund amassed by their political party from political donations, bribes and kickbacks accumulated during their term of office. They can make more money sitting on boards of directors and making lectures and appearances. They have bodyguards for life provided by their successors, and in the worst case they can always flee and live in comfortable exile in one of the countries to whom they provided corrupt favors while in office.

And there is an inherent weakness of democracy that is even more terrible than the ordinary, short-term greed of leading office holders. This other weakness is that bad government policies which lead to poverty and war are not just as an unfortunate side effect of the leaders’ normal greed and anxiety to make their pile in a very short term of office, but more or less a deliberate design. Simply put, good and benevolent government policies are unsatisfactory to the people who earn money from government, because government’s special job (so they claim) is to clean up messes and problems that free people cannot handle on their own. If you make your living from crises, then it is in your best interest to create as many insoluble crises as possible. Starting a drug war lets you build a huge police force and prison system whose jobs become political plums. Screwing up foreign policy and creating enemies lets you build a gigantic military and secret police force as a device for increasing pork and patronage and as an all-round domestic and foreign power enhancer. Making a horrible public school system leads to complaints, so in order to combat illiteracy even more years of pre-school and college must be funded, leading to more pork, more patronage jobs, and more opportunities to drive propaganda into your subjects’ brains.

Therefore, to pursue a policy which will lead to the wreck of a country not only enriches the current leaders, it is exactly the policy which the next generation of leaders desires. That is why Clinton was like Bush II, Bush II was more like Bush III, and Obama is for all practical purposes Bush IV. Such is the normal operating procedure of democracy. Even if none of the leaders have the slightest conscious or unconscious desire to become a marxist or nationalist dictator, the country is ruined just the same.