> On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 6:02 PM, Bruce Metcalf <[email protected]>wrote: > > I've got to side with lukhman here. I do not wish the mentally deficient to > > help decide the fate of my country. We can all imagine those so enfeebled by > > age, disease, or damage that their vote could never be more than a random > > selection, though we can agree to disagree on how to draw that line.
The point of democracy is not to make the best possible decision. It is to ensure that really terrible decisions, decisions which predictably impoverish or kill or imprison large groups of people, are not taken. India had regular famines under the British raj; the last one was in 1944, just four years before independence. It killed several million people. There have been no mass famine deaths since independence. In fact, as far as I know, there has never been a mass famine death in a democracy, however uneducated its citizenry. It is rather frequently the case, however, that groups of people denied the vote are treated rather badly in democracies: slaves in ancient Athens, women in the 19th-century US, the "mentally deficient" in the early 20th-century US (subjected to mass involuntary sterilization), minors and foreigners in every democracy I know of. It is for this reason that I do not support proposals to deny the franchise to the "mentally deficient". Kragen
