On 12/18/2014 2:05 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 9:07 PM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 12/17/2014 8:11 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 17 Dec 2014, at 13:03, Alberto G. Corona wrote: Starting from the fact that The NHS was introduced by Bismark in the German Empire. for the same reasons that it is sustained today by "democracies": populism. Since the introduction of NHS in England no new hospital was constructed until recently. Democracy, an element of the liberal state, lives on premises that it can not itself guarantee. (Bockenforde). It is based on the idea that people will not act or vote for their inmediate interests but will vote for anything that maintain the common good forever. That is absolutely false. The only thing that maintain democracy is not democracy, but the morality of the people. That morality is contunuously underminded by democracy itself by means of the logic of populism and the formation of majorities that produce false and impossible and incompatible political promises for different groups of people. That divides and confront ones with others. It is based on the idea that a million idiot votes within an urn produces wise decissions. On the idea that consensus produce truth. Democracy is destined to be hyaked by false democrats that do not believe in democracy but want to abuse it from inside . They are the worst antidemocrats. And the responsibles of that hyaking are te dumb people that believe acritically in democracy. I disagree. Democracy is based on the fact that people will vote for their immediate interest, and that it will be implemented reasonably well by opportunist politicians, and if they don't succeed people will stop voting against them. (so it is not just vote, but a promise that you can vote again if dissatisfied). Democracy is not perfect, and indeed it can regress easily to tyranny. Like a living being can die, or a cell become cancerous, democracy can easily be perverted and misused by bandits or ideologues. There is nothing we can do about that, except investing in means (like education, logic, reasoning, ...) helping people to not fall in the trap of the demagogs. It is not the system which makes bad people. It is bad people which makes the system bad. How americans have ever accepted prohibition remains a bit of a mystery to me. In this context, I am not so much for legalization of drugs than for penalization of prohibitionists, and education explaining how prohibition illustrates well a technic to kill democracy and its most important key features like the separation and independence of the different powers, including the press. They accepted it out of Puritan theology: that this life is just a test and indulgence in any pleasure is suspect and possibly a sin. It's the same strain of thought that wants to ban any recreational drugs, pornography, prostitution, homosexuality,... But the institutionalization of religion, especially when the state and the religion are not well separated is a deeper cause of the problem for democracies. It is that mentality which has made possible prohibition: the very idea that other people can decide for you between the good and the wrong. But people who live in a community do need to decide on some rules of behavior in order to live without conflict. The important thing is distinguish between a sphere of personal morals and a sphere of public ethics. This is the thing missing in Islam (and was missing in the West before the Enlightenment). The great advancement of the U.S. was not democracy, the Greeks and Scandanavians had invented democracy long before; it was the invention of constitutionally limited government and inalienable human rights.I agree. I am a great admirer of the american constitution. Sadly, I think it eventually failed. In my view the flaw is that the constitution still requires interpretation. If it could be written in some formal mathematical language, then it could be directly implemented by every citizen, policeman, judge, soldier, etc.
That's a pure fantasy. The Constitution was written if fairly plain language, but it could not (and should not) have foreseen every technological advance. It said little about privacy, only prohibiting "unreasonable search" because surveillance was impractical in 1780.
Requiring interpretation, the state ends up being ultimately ruled by the supreme court. Giving life tenure to the supreme court judges is a good strategy but not a perfect one. Eventually we arrived at one of the most terrifying scenarios that the constitution was designed to prevent: total surveillance of the state over its citizens. The majority is ok with it, and so democracy risks ending up in tyranny once again.
In the founding father's plan tyranny was to be avoided by having many competing factions. I think they didn't realize that the way elections were set up would necessarily force a two party system. And of course they couldn't foresee the effect of mass communications: radio and television, and its implications for those with enormous wealth.
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