Democracy's Most Critical Defect

Liberty and Power at the History News Network ^ | 10-27-09 | Robert Higgs

[Captain Kirk]

Although democracy now comes closer than anything else to serving as a world religion, it has never lacked critics. For millennia those critics, such as Aristotle, had large followings among political thinkers and practicing politicians. Even as late as 1787, when a group of prominent men met in Philadelphia to compose the U.S. Constitution, democracy was viewed with trepidation, and the framers created an apparatus of government in which democracy was hemmed in on all sides, lest the country fall into the much-dreaded condition of “mob rule.”

Nowadays, democracy’s defects are more likely to be seen as relatively benign ― its devotees like to quote Winston Churchill’s quip that “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” ― or as defects not of democracy itself, but of the party shenanigans and other frictions that keep the democratic system from operating more fully. Thus, people complain of “gridlock” and bemoan a “do-nothing” Congress because these things impede the unrestricted functioning of democracy.

Public choice theorists have written countless articles and books spelling out the manifold ways in which democracy, viewed as a political decision rule for making collective choices by means of voting, may fail to aggregate the preferences of individual constituents into an outcome that represents the “will of the people.” More than fifty years ago, Kenneth Arrow showed that no such aggregation is possible, given certain seemingly appealing restrictions on the nature of people’s preferences, such as transitivity (if A is preferred to B, and B is preferred to C, then C cannot be preferred to A).

None of this theorizing had the slightest effect on the common people’s idea that democracy can and should translate the “will of the people” into collective

[pogo101]

Once a nation has an unproductive majority that VOTES for its living, effectively ruling a productive minority that WORKS for its living, the jig is up.

[El Gato]

The word "democracy" nor any varient of it, such as "democratic", "democratically" does not appear in the Constitution.

For Good Reason.

In our Republic, under the Constitution, there are limits to what majorities can do.

But I guess the founders fears have been realized. Maybe they made the Constitution too easy to amend?

I think the downfall can be traced to the 16th amendment which allowed the federal government to tax individuals directly, and the 17th amendment which made the federal government more "democratic", and of course the "broad" Roosevelt era interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, really give things a shove over the precipice of "democracy".

[TurtleUp]

Cemocracy's most deadly defect!