I’m of two minds when it comes to democracy. On the one hand, it’s the best political system yet devised. On the other hand, it needs to be beaten to death with a large mallet, wrapped in a tarp, loaded down with rocks and dumped off a bridge into a deep river.
One the one hand, democracy is understood to mean that a people can choose their own destiny.
But on the other hand, in practice what it seems to mean is that a people can choose someone else’s destiny. The usual analogy here is “democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
In a good democratic system, people could vote on directions their government could take… but not on what the government can take from the people. This has proven virtually impossible to achieve. In *real* democratic systems, people vote on what they want for themselves, and grant their government the power – and the right – to take the required resources from other people. This is, to put it bluntly, evil.
And stepping up to demonstrate and advocate this evil dark side of democracy is Peter Wilby, a writer for the British rag The Guardian, and apparently straight out of Central Casting for the role of “evil British-accented effete Galactic Imperial officer.”
In a recent editorial, he bloviated ignorantly:
It is surely admirable – isn’t it? – that 40 US billionaires, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have signed the “giving pledge” to donate half their fortunes to charity. … But let’s be clear. Money paid to charity is exempt from tax; the US treasury already loses at least $40bn (£25bn) a year from tax breaks for donations. So billionaires, not the democratically elected and (at least theoretically) accountable representatives of the people, get to decide on the good causes.
In other words… give away all your money to the government, let the bureaucrats decide what to do with it.
And he’s not alone. In another, fortunately shorter writeup, idiot fascist Barbara Gunnell wrote:
If the Gateses, von Furstenbergs and Bloombergs want top ranking in the pantheon of benefactors they have to give away something really important. How about giving the poor the chance to decide the fate of the wealthy? How about delegates from the poorest 100 countries deciding how much of the world’s wealth they want to allocate to software developers, dress designers, film producers etc and how much to eradicating poverty?
How about… no.
Those who legally earn a fortune (and since laws vary from place to place, by “legal” I mean “they lived up to the terms of the contract they willingly signed”) have every right to do with it as they please. Those who argue against that argue against the idea that slavery is wrong. They also tend to argue from a position of staggering ignorance. Commisar Wilby wrote:
Far better that they open their wallets to deserving causes than that they spend yet more money on yachts, carbon-emitting private jets or garish mansions.
Really? How about the people who *build* yachts, jets and mansions? If nobody buys those products – and only the rich can – then they lose business and consequently their jobs. This doesn;t mean just the Evil Rich (Almost Certainly White Male) Businessmen who own the yacht companies, but also the riveters, the electrical engineers, the pipe fitters, they guy who sprays gelcoat on the boat hull molds. And then it spreads out to the companies who supply the tools and parts and lumber and lightbulbs.
Additionally, those who create industries, create a multitude of jobs that did not exist before. For the most part they did not earn their billions by breaking into the houses of po’ foke and stealing their cookies; they earned their billions by creating products or services that large numbers of people decided they want. Yeah, people bitch about the bugs in Microsoft… and go right out and buy the latest version of it. Because on the whole, people know that these products make their lives better in some way. I know that *I* would sure as hell rather work with my creaky old Microsoft Word ’97 word processor program than bang all this crap out on a Smith Corona. Fascists like Wilby seem to think that economics is a zero sum game… one person becoming a billionaire means that everyone else goes down an economic notch. This worldview is of course nonsense. But it seems to be a popular worldview, and it informs its believers views about democracy.
Those people who would use democracy (and the almost fetishistic adoration of democracy that most people in the west seem to at least pretend to have) as a way to rob others are a detriment to society. These people argue that the labor of certain folk is the property of “the common good,” which means, in effect, that at any time someone could find themselves retroactively enslaved. People like Wilby should be exposed for what they are, and ridiculed in the public square… and finally ignored. But so long as he and his ilk continue to bleat his jealous bleat and impact public opinion and voting patterns… he should be noted, his views raised publicy, and his opinions mocked and shown to be the product of an unsteady mind.
And if, in the end, a large enough mob of people can be raised to storm his home with torches and pitchforks in the middle of the night, tar and feather him and run him out of town on a rail… why, that’d be democracy in action, would it not?
15 Responses to “The Two Meanings of “Democracy””
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“Really? How about the people who *build* yachts, jets and mansions? ”
fall river,MA used to make some amazing yachts in the 1970’s
they had the full infrastructure to build them from the ground up.. woodworkers, electricians, ect.
then someone got the idea that he could gain point with “the poor” by taxing “those rich people” who bought the yachts. 30% if I remember right.
the entire industry dried up overnight. thousands were out of work. thousands more not directly in the industry were out of work as well.
those specialized skills were not passed down…we couldn’t rebuild that industry if we wanted to. (I think this is a problem NASA will have in a few years..there will be no one left that knows how to do certain things)
the tax brought in little to no revenue. but boy, it sure did stick it to those rich people. they had to go all the way to ireland to buy their yachts! oh and many registered them in ireland so they didn’t get the taxes that way either.
Democracy is two seventeen years old boys your teenage daughter and a twelve pack of beer.
If Wilby and Gunnell are so Good, let them do it first.
The Brits seem to have a genetic need for single-pane windows and autocracy. I guess that’s why we have Americans on the planet.
Well, you know what Marx said about Democracy, eh? About how it lead to socialism?
Problem with unlimited majority rule is that if the majority decides it wants to tar and feather the minority, under Democracy, it can do so. The point of the Constitution was to make sure mobs couldn’t just do whatever they pleased, or at least not without changing the Constitution to allow it first, which was made really hard so that it would be unlikely that anyone could do it for stupid reasons. It was probably the single best choke chain on government ever devised… and yet here we all are.
Should a supermodel atone for her fame, by having sexual congress with some pimply-faced, awkward, geeky, loser who can’t attract a woman on his own?
Should a politician hand over the reins of his office over to some crack-smoking criminal, who never had his advantages.
Should a reporter hand his, or her, post over to some illiterate mendicant and let them…. Or did that already occur?
How many poor people has Peter, or Barbara, actually encountered?
Maybe the 100 poorest countries should decide how hard a horse fucking those two get.
Should a politician hand over the reins of his office over to some crack-smoking criminal, who never had his advantages.
I would argue that this has definitely occurred. They’re definitely criminals, and as for the former, only drugs could make what has come out of Congress over the last 2 years actually sound like a good idea.
I’m not a purist about politics. In an oil rich nation (shell-fare state), if everyone is a billionaire, and they divide everything up–everyone is still rich. With aging boomers in hospitals, if our tax rates didn’t go up, insurance rates surely would anyway.
A lot of the billionaires who recently wanted to give their fortunes away often want this money to go out of the US. Seeing that gates and others made this money thanks to US infrastrtucture, Apollo/ICBM circuitry, road systems, gullible saps who viewed Lucas films–I’d say we our in our rights to raise taxes on these folks if only to keep US money here for NASA.
“Seeing that gates and others made this money thanks to US infrastrtucture, Apollo/ICBM circuitry, road systems, gullible saps who viewed Lucas films–I’d say we our in our rights to raise taxes on these folks if only to keep US money here for NASA.”
Well aren’t you a selfish bastard who hates the poor? How dare you think of something as frivolous as space exploration when people are starving?!?
/sarcasm
Saying that Gates owes his fortune to US infrastructure is like saying that you owe everything you make to your employer because he’s the one who provided you with your work environment, or like saying that I shouldn’t take credit for my research work because most of the foundational mathematics was invented by other people. So… seeing that the only reason that there is any actually money to discuss is because Gates and those others actually sat down and MADE it, perhaps they should have the right to dispose of it as they see fit.
If say, a Food magnate makes money on the Interstate system, he ought to help pay for what he uses. My point is that a lot of the folks who give money away are probably lefies who believe in higher taxes, why not oblige them only and pay for space that way.
Or that, for every 100 bucks someone buys of regular stock, they have to buy 20 dollars of space start up stock.
Good to see people standing up for the rights of the rich to rip their money off from the poor.
Capitalism sucks big times boys. Bet none of you have ever been poor. So dirt poor that you can’t afford food, can’t afford housing and you have to live on the street.
Ah, yes, I can hear it now, “I won’t get to that point”, “I’d get me a real job” and so on and so on. Sometimes circumstances doesn’t allow that. Remember, every rich piggie got rich by making some poor bloke even poorer.
> every rich piggie got rich by making some poor bloke even poorer.
Snerk!
” every rich piggie got rich by making some poor bloke even poorer.”
Yes, clearly a system in which the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers pay 45% of the taxes, and the bottom 47% of wage-earners pay no taxes at all, is an evil capitalist nightmare where the rich are robbing the poor.
In a free market economy, no corporation would have the ability to take one dollar out of your pocket without your consent. The only way a corporation can rob the public is by teaming up with government’s guns. There are many different names for a system in which that happens, but capitalism is not one of them.
The rich get rich how? By taking money from the poor. They gauge the poor as much as they can. Time for the rich piggies to pay. “To each according to his need”. If rich piggies played fair, they wouldn’t be rich. American society glorifies that unfairness. It caused the global financial crisis. See global capitalism all fall down. QED.
If I didn’t know that you actually believe that rubbish, I’d think you were some sort of anti-leftist troll spouting obvious nonsense in an effort to make leftists look like a pack of drooling morons.
As it is, you’re really not worth arguing with. You’re simply a nut.