My case against democracy.
Last line: “And so, democracy is immoral, irrational, and unnecessary. It should be torn down from its revered pedestal and dumped in the intellectual junk pile of history.” Heh.
It was great! [:)]
I don’t agree with the reasoning. And the format makes me think it was written by a high school student who doesn’t know anything better than the 5 paragraph research paper.
all forms of government involve people giving up some freedom in exchange for the relative safety and comfort of society. government is a force monopoly that serves to enforce contracts with the full might of the ruling body. In anarchy, in order to take someone’s stuff you need only have enough fore to overcome their defenses. With a force monopoly every contract is implicitly backed up by overwhelming force. This greatly reduces the incetive towards using violence to achieve your ends.
the second paragraph is arguing against a straw man. we don’t live in a total democracy, and even if we did the robbers would be breaking laws enacted by the majority. reductio ad absurdum is a fallacy, not a method of attack.
As for being unnecessary, I agree. But democracy is the natural result of the branch of political thought that started with the magna carta and should have ended with the National Socialists and Communists of the early 20th century. Democracy differentiated itself enough from those failed socialist ideologies to survive. Without competition, democracy will now continue to expand unopposed.
Reductio ad absurdam isn’t a fallacy; if it is, then you’ve overturned a lot of proofs in mathematics. Why? Because RAA is the same as proof by contradiction, and that’s how, for example, we show that the set of primes is infinite. So I really don’t think you want to call RAA a fallacy, do you?
Also, while we don’t live in a total democracy, a good chunk of people in modern “democratic” nation-states do “cherish” the idea of democracy. So it’s well and proper to explain what democracy really is.
What BAAWA said. RAA is most certainly a valid form of reasoning.
it can be if every step is rigorous. scientific rigor is impossible in the social sciences though, because we can only identify strong correlations, not causations.
But when you’re talking about the concept itself, and what it means, you can apply RAA.