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SPEAKING FREELY
Disgusted with democracy
By Tibor R Machan

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

It's about this time of every other year that I get really disgusted with democracy. It has become little more than legalized looting, if you think about it a bit. Politicians travel about promising that if you just vote for them, they will do you the favor of robbing others for your benefit.

It makes nearly no difference whether they are Democrats, Republicans or whatever - the mainstream political parties of the United States have become organized criminal gangs that collect taxes from powerless and even powerful victims and spend the money almost any way they want to. It is disgusting, really, an abomination in a so-called free society.

There is no excuse for this. Even democracy itself implies that it must be limited or it is self-destructive: The majority of voters can actually vote to wipe out majority rule altogether, unless democracy is confined to certain limited areas of concern. And democracy also implies that the majority may not vote on just anything - if one has the right to vote, after all, this must come from having other rights as well, including the right to one's life, liberty and property. Otherwise why does one have a right to vote - what makes that such an important activity?

To join with a bunch of others to empower a few so as to wield tremendous power over a great many who didn't vote for them at all, this is vicious. I vote for you so you can enact a measure that deprives my neighbors of their labor and resources - how vile is that anyway?

A few people sense this clearly enough, even among ordinary voters. In California, for example, voters were urged to give power to the government to sell bonds so as to spend money on stem-cell research. But many among those whose labor and resources would be spent do not believe in this practice; they consider it out and out evil. But the majority of voters could force them to fund the policy they consider evil. And a few voters made comments about just how vicious this process is - like voting people into forced labor for a project they morally oppose! Is that a free country? No.

Democratic procedures may apply to very limited tasks - as the selection of benign leaders, presiding officers, mayors, governors and such, if these stay away from wielding oppressive power over others - like voting for the referees of a sporting event. That's all. Anything else is much, much closer to the nature of a lynching, where the majority of local citizens vote to hang someone without due process, without proving the victim guilty of any criminal conduct.

I know that many people are fond of democracy partly because they hail from - or at least think of - places where ordinary folks have no say whatever about the public policies they would have to live with. So by just making it possible for them to get a bit of say about what laws and rules would prevail, they are made ecstatic and hopeful. Such folks fail to realize that these people may have jumped from the frying pan into the fire - from the dictatorship of one or a few into the dictatorship of many (though usually not the majority, since most folks in the US do not actually take part in the vote). This way the fact that what's really important is individual liberty gets papered over with this ruse about democracy - as if merely taking part in voting amounted to being free. It doesn't, by a long shot.

Of course, there are situations where democracy or majority vote makes good sense and doesn't involve the oppression of some by others. When people join a club and voluntarily sign up to have issues decided on democratically, that's fine. They didn't have to join the club or church or corporation.

But this isn't at all like being a member of a society into which one was born with no choice about whether to decide matters democratically. Free men and women are not supposed to be coerced into democratic politics any more than into dictatorial types. They are supposed to be free - even from democracy. If I work hard and earn my income and acquire my property honestly, no majority has any moral authority to take my labor and my belongings, even if the vote is clean and fair. It is still looting my stuff, my life even.

Alas, the only relief from this bleakness is that an understanding of human individual liberty has only recently begun within the human race and millions of people many other places have even less of a clue about it than people do in the United States. The idea that you own your life and its works and have sovereign rights over these is so novel, so little understood, let alone practiced, that perhaps one needs a bit of patience with it all.

(Copyright Tibor R Machan)

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

Nov 3, 2004

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