Re: Down with Democracy!

Kevin Dempsey Peterson (peterson@ocf.Berkeley.EDU)
Mon, 22 Dec 1997 16:59:05 -0800 

On Sun, 21 Dec 1997, Jeff Bishop wrote:

>Daniel C. Burton wrote:
>
>> Go up on the shock value props and on the good ideas and I imagine we'd
>> get quite a bit of attention.
>
>I hate to sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but this "great libertarian flasher"
>tactic is likely to backfire.  I'm also curious why so many [L/l]ibertarians
>assume that a republic will protect liberty any more than a direct democracy
>would.  Spare me all the neat quotations; history does not bear it out.  [The
>Weimar *Republic* being a gross example, but not the only one.]
>
>In a democracy, we would only have to persuade 51% (actually 50.00000025% or
>so) to respect each other's autonomy and we'd be finished.  When will 51% of
>our Congresscritters vote to end the war on drugs?  Probably not until 90% of
>the general population wants them to, since any Congressman who votes his
>conscience will soon be an ex-Congressman.  Convince a citizen that X is a bad
>idea, and he'll vote against X with no fear of repercussions.  Given the
>unfortunate choice, I'd sooner trust 51% of my fellow citizens than 51% of the
>legislators to vote libertarian issues.

Something I just thought of -- anti-democracy != anti-government.  You
can be anti-democracy and want a dictatorship.  You can be
anti-government and believe that in general, democracy is preferable to
other forms of government.

What is this protest about, really?  Jeff is quite right once I think
about it.  Representative democracy isn't the solution to mob rule.  It
can help in some ways, but people are stupid, and when their political
involvement is only voting for people to make the laws, they will vote
for people based on the candidates opinions on issues the people haven't
studied and don'tk now jack about.

I'm in favor of restricting the franchise to any arbitrary group who
can't vote to "preserve their power".  I thought for a while that "tax
payers" was a good group for this, but now that I think of it, tax
payers (as a group) can probably profit by outlawing things and pushing
that economy underground.  Any sort of education or intelligence based
measure would allow the "ruling class" to raise the level required, so
that in each vote, they would cut out a minority (high school diploma
--> high school diploma and employed --> high school diploma, employed,
and never convicted of a crime and so on)

The only real solution is to limit the influence of the voters mob
mentality.  Republicanism has failed - the people in office are not
leaders, they are just expressions of the whims of their constituents.

Does anyone have a proposal for a better working system, *for
government*, or a set of restrictions on government that would improve
the system?  If the only proposal we can come up with as an alternative
to democracy is no government at all, then it's not really an
anti-democracy protest.

We've had a lot of talk about how bad democracy is, but I don't think
anyone has proposed an alternative.  I'm opposed to direct democracy
because I think it would be harder to circumscribe than representative
democracy.  I'm only opposed to democracy in principle because it
presupposes that a group of people have a right to prevent you from
doing something that a single person doesn't have the right to prevent
you from doing.

There are, as I see it, two solutions - do away with government, or
persuade people to realize that they have no right to take away
liberties, either alone or in a group.

-- 
peterson@ocf.berkeley.edu       
http://www.autobahn.org/~peterson