So many in the Homeowner Association Movement are fond of saying the HOA is “the purest form of Democracy.” That concept, though should really be a thing to shudder about, not to celebrate.
For Democracy is the autocratic, even dictitorial rule by a small group over the pathetically clueless masses. Those masses are generally uninformed, disinformed, sometimes by intent, and often by design, while the Democracy throws its weight into ruling the masses.
When the great French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville was sent to study this confounding new creation of our “self-working republic,” he was amazed by many things.
He warned that “modern democracy may be adept at creating tyrants and that that new tyrannies that would lead to conditions in which we would “lose interest” in the future of our descendents and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic course all the more because it does not resemble one.
If Tocqueville could be suddenly lifted forward to examine the modern Homeowner Association Movement, one can imagine hearing him say, “I told you so.”
Our HOA democracies are so far outside the mainstream of truly democratic life. People who join these growing communities where traditional government has been removed and all the freedoms we expect to find have just evaporated.
Isn’t that exactly what happened in Las Vegas? Hundreds of thousands of homeowners suddenly lost a great deal of equity in their homes, because they just quit looking for the kind of greed that Tocqueville predicted would be there.
Why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king can.