On Oct 10, 2007, at 2:26 AM, Robert Wensman wrote:
Yes, of course, the Really Big Fish that is democracy.


No, you got this quite wrong. The Really Big Fish is institution responsible for governance (usually the "government"); "democracy" is merely a fuzzy category of rule set used in governance.


I am starting to get quite puzzled by all Americans (I don't know if you are American though, but I want to express this anyway) who express severe distrust in government. Because if you distrust all forms of government, what you really distrust is democracy itself.


This bias is for good reason; there are well described pathological minima that are essentially unavoidable in a democracy. The American government was explicitly designed as a constitutional republic (not a democracy) to avoid these pathologies. In the 20th century the American constitution was changed to make it more like a democracy, and the expected pathologies have materialized.

If you do not understand this, then the rest of your reasoning is likely misplaced. Much of American libertarian political thought is based on a desire to go back to a strict constitutional republic rather than the current quasi-democracy, in large part to fix the very real problems that quasi-democracy created. Many of the "bad" things the Federal government is currently accused of were enabled by democracy and would have been impractical or illegal under a strict constitutional republic.


Here you basically compare democracy to...  whom? The devil!?


Perhaps I should refrain from using literate metaphors in the future, since you apparently did not understand it.


My recommendation is to put some faith in the will of the people! When you walk on the street and look around you, those are your fellow citizen you should feel at least some kind of trust in. They are not out to get you!


I'm sure they are all lovely people for the most part, but their poorly reasoned good intentions will destroy us all. The problem is not that people are evil, the problem is that humans at large are hopelessly ignorant, short-sighted, and irrational even when trying to do good and without regard for clearly derivable consequences.


Actually, I believe that the relative stupidity of the population could act as a kind of protection against manipulation.


Non sequitur.


Also, the history shows that intelligence is no guarantee for power. The Russian revolution and the genocide in Cambodia illustrates effectively how intelligent people were slaughtered by apparently less intelligent people, and later how they were controlled to the extreme for decades.


You are improperly conflating intelligence and rationality.


Cheers,

J. Andrew Rogers



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