Re: Down with Democracy!

Daniel C. Burton (dburton@ocf.berkeley.edu)
17 Dec 1997 06:37:39 GMT 

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Seth David Schoen <schoen@uclink4.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
: >1. Democratic rule can be a bad thing.
: >2. Basic liberties should not be subject to the opinion of the majority.
: >3. A limited republic with checks against democracy is better than pure
: >democracy.  (In my opinion, the most important of these checks is that
: >powers are enacted locally and limited nationally.)

: I guess these are appropriate principles.

Actually, now that I think about it, we should scrap all those formal
criteria.  #2 is good and pretty basic and maybe we should use that as a
guideline, but in true libertarian style we should try to work with
whoever we can, and if we can't work things out to mutual satisfaction,
we should just get up and leave them.

I guess what I said before about the "fuck everything" anarchists isn't
really what I meant to say.  I a lot of my friends are anarchists of some
sort, but not libertarians, and definitely not leftists.  I don't think
they want us to all go up in flames either, and they seem to have an
innate respect for individual sovereignty (beyond merely an ideology), but
chaos is part of their thing.  Actually, I prefer some chaos to too much
institutionalized authority as well....  These are the supposed "Type 3"
anarchists I briefly mentioned earlier.  Basically take an
anarcho-capitalists and subtract the capitalist part, or take an
anarcho-socialist and subtract the class struggle, and this is what you
get.  Personally, I think people like this are a lot closer to
libertarians than left-wing anarchists are.  I've even heard people
influenced by this sort of thinking call themselves "essentially
libertarian, but not political."

It would do us good to seek out people like this, because they just might
be interested in something as bizarre as a political rally against
politics.  (None of the ones I know actually go to Cal.  They just live
around here.)

As far as the objectivists go, Ayn Rand wrote a lot of stuff about how
freedom shouldn't be subject to the vote of a majority.  She even has some
good quotes if we can dig them up.  I think we could work that in and
objectivists would like it if that was part of the theme -- a protest
against excessive democracy.  We should explicity state at the beginning
that we don't all agree with eachother, but we do agree on some things.

As long as we're moving in the right direction and we don't get the
fascists involved, I think we'll be OK.

Start thinking of slogans....

Warning:  Excessive democracy can be harmful to your health.


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