Today, if you listen to anything on TV, or at school ,or anywhere, inevitably democracy will be labeled as the ultimate politcal virtue.
At my University, example thesis questions indicate such by constantly comparing democracies in favorable conditions. Equality, democracy, human rights, etc. are all compared as if they stem from one another. I’d like to debunk this.
My personal opinion is that democracy is flouted as the justification for any and everything because it is politcally correct. We all know the U.S. was not formed as a democracy yet this fallacy has permeated everything. People are told to look towards democracy because it makes them feel like their opinion and input in the political process is equal to everyone else, another thing we all know not to be true.
So, I start here: Name a financially responsible democratic nation state.
Define responsible anyway you think is 'responsible and ‘democratic’ to any degree you think (I have a feeling I’ll get trolled for this…)
Here were initial responses I got on G+
Here is the simple information I got (the three main (generally accepted) Macro stats and debt-GDP.
Does anyone else have any insight either for or against blind support of democracy?
I’m familiar with Hoppe. I’ll check out that other one, although I am not pumped about paying for it…
And no one has any other democratic state with a good example of financial responsibility? No one wants to say Japan? Or something that is at least defensible?
Australia circa 2006 had no federal government debt (in fact a surplus), and average 3% inflation. This was a result of the Liberal government paying off the previous Labor government’s debt over a decade. The next year (2007), the Labor party won the federal election and proceeded to spend. Today the federal government’s debt is somewhere around 20% of GDP - with a new round of spending and taxation just around the corner (i.e. in a month and a half!). The current government, however, is immensely unpopular and will be gone by the end of next year (hopefully much sooner).
Government debt, however, should not be the only thing to look at, since during the period in which the Liberal government paid down the federal debt, they put several policies into effect to encourage a housing bubble that may be in its dying days.
Democracy is the fast track to absolutism if not checked by Constitutional Federalism or some other poltiical mechanism to intentionally decentralize, balance, limit, and make transparent the elements of armed force in society.
Not only does the absence of institutionalized restrictions on armed force make pure democracy a failure – it leads to absolutism among anarchist societies.
Oh trust me I have some very long rants against democracy that I plan to post in later weeks. It’s really just about the most dreadful system imaginable. But let’s just leave it at the fact that it not only deals with an area of human organization which should not exist, but it hands over the division of labor in handling this organization to anyone. It literally goes against the very thing which society is founded upon: The division of labor. Anyone can vote, no matter how stupid, smart, delusional, or self serving, and there is absolutely no factor which pulls this state of affair to a state of positive equilibrium. The market will always give people what they really want, as an end, the product which they desire. Democracy will, at best, give people the means that they want, but there’s no way to test the end, there’s no way to really say “X” policy was good, or “Y policy was bad”, in this changing and incredibly complex world of ours.
Democracy sucks, and it is a god which people associate with freedom and liberation.
Oh well if we’re just ranting against democracy, we could always point to how even the Founding Fathers, who disagreed on plenty of things, seemed to agree on this one…
It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
-Alexander Hamilton
Speech in New York, urging ratification of the U.S. Constitution (1788-06-21)
Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. […]
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.
-John Adams
Letter to John Taylor (1814)
One wise man summed it up with “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.”
Democracy is no form of governance, it’s a form of rule.
I have always liked Ron Paul’s article on LewRockwell.com about democracy. I’ve literally printed it out and left it in random places before hoping someone might read it. lol
From 39-45 democratic Germany and democratic UK, France, USA fought eachother.
Anyway, the inherent superiority of ‘democracy’ is such a big part of the propaganda of democratic states, and ‘making the world safe for democracy’ such a big part of their war propaganda in particular, that it is clear why they have not greatly waged war on eachother - since their legitimacy is based on the divinity of democracy. Not to mention that in the history to date, virtually all democracies are simply under the hegemony of a single state, the USA.
JJ, you did read further, yes? I wasn’t disagreeing with you (God forbid). There is a difference in ‘type of government’ and the decision on it. Democracies can choose tyranny or freedom or any combination thereof, but they do not choose “democracy” because it itself is not a kind of goverment…
Oh, yeah? Even by 1939 you still consider Germany a democracy?
I think democracies don’t attack each other because they can co opt each others political resources to their favor. The U.S. woiuld have sided with Germany (or been neutral) in both WWs if the people and their economic connections had won out over the British and their political influence.
This is a good point. Much of “democratic” history has been shadowed by the U.S.'s democratic use of the A-bomb om innocent civil…I mean Imperial nips. Who’d step to that?
Well over 50% of the German franchise voted for extremely statist parties even in the last clearly free elections - the Nazi party just happened to be the most popular of them. The UK and France were willing to side with a dictatorship that owed its governance to a military coup (Poland) against a democracy whose policies were at least for the most part in line with the political desires of the majority of its citizens (Germany).
I guess I thought it was in 1933 that they elected Hitler and then in 34-36 that he consolidated power and cancelled elections (revoking the democratic principle).
But then you’d have to say that the USA is only a democracy on the days it has elections. A more important qualification than elections is majority rule.
Not necessarily (my definition differs from the Establishment). If Hitler revoked elections it is no bearing over the Constitutional parameters in the U.S. It did for Germany, however.
Democracies are not designed to provide anything other than protections against the emergence of absolutism. THey are intentionally inefficient and ponderous. However, the mechanism by which protections against absolutism is accomplished is the intentional and institutionalize decentralization, balancing, limiting, and transparency of the elements of armed force in society.
By itself, democracy quickly degenerates into absolutism – when attenuated by a constitution, federalism and republicanism – this degeneration is considerably slowed and reduced in severity.
Of course, no system is immune to the virus of statism and despotism – however liberal democracy has provided the best protections yet devised. Certainly far more effective than Marxism, anarchism, monarchism, et al or any variation of these utopian systems.
