Posted on 11/12/2001 6:49:48 AM PST by Aurelius
Others on this thread have called what you refer to as "free democracy" a Republic and what you call a "socialist democracy" a Democracy. I think the latter form of government is in rather low regard here. The primary argument against the former is that it inevitably becomes the latter.
i hope that clarifies what i mean. if not, let me go further. democracy in western civilization preceeded the industrial revolution. england was moving to a democracy with the signing of the magna carter in the 1200s i think. it had a strong militia (and had easily defendable borders). it benefited highly from the industrial revolution, and those who invested benefited extremely well. i can make the same comments about the united states -- except replace the magna carta part with the dec of indep.
If we replace "free democracy" with Republic I agree, except in one regard. Were these countries economically free because of or in spite of their form of government?
the industrial revolution bypassed germany initially.
German government was fairly despotic. Bismarck's unification only stabilized the problem of foreign invasion and in that respect only did the German economy benefit. (Side note, some regions were already pretty stable and didn't benefit from Prussian military power. Bavaria in particular.)
Although we are using different terms, I think we're saying the same thing -- that economies only prosper in an environment where property is secure, respected and protected. The question then becomes, how best do we achieve this? I think we can agree that fascism and/or social democracy is marginally better than communism and that a republic ("true democracy") is better than a social democracy.
But how does monarchy measure up? From an economic standpoint, monarchy is almost never communistic and tends to have low taxes and a small bureaucracy. From a civil rights perspective, monarchies can be awful but a careful examination of history shows that for all the horrors inflicted by monarchs, most of this pales by comparison to say, the French Revolution.
Clearly there are good monarchies (I'll call them "polite monarchies") and bad monarchies ("absolute monarchies"). Britain up until the 19th century was a polite monarchy that became a republic in the early 19th century and then became a social democracy in the 20th century. Note that Britain's economic dominance ends pretty much in sync with its rejection of limited government.
In fact the emergence of industrialization amongst the English is clearly to due their rejection of absolute monarchy. Again, limited government is a product of culture rather than governmental stucture, per se.
Hoppe goes even further in his analysis and asks: What would be even more secure than monarchy?
His answer is to identify a natural social order stemming from the concepts of property and the market itself. Those governments that interfere with the market the least have the most prosperous and peaceful societies. So what if our legal system didn't intefere with the natural order at all? What if the idea of a monopoly legal system was rejected outright?
Anyway, food for thought . . .
Many people on Free Republic have claimed that the United States was formed as a Republic, not a Democracy. I have never been able to make a distinction between the two. In fact, I have never been anyone on FR make reference to the political forms which differentiate between terms.
The only difference, I think, is that a Republic observes the Constitution and a Democracy doesn't. There is no analysis of the political institutions which would impel the nation to act as the one instead of the other. Simply a sort of call to order, a remembrance of the good old days when people did care about the meaning of the words that that fore fathers wrote down.
Daniel Webster's 1828 dictionary makes it clear that, to the founders, a Republic was what we today would call a representative democracy while a 'Democracy' is what we call a Direct Democracy (e.g., the form of government of Classical Athens). It would seem quite clear that the FFs did achieve their vision. By their definition, we live in a republic today.
The difference between a "free democracy" and a "socialist democracy" is meaningless. They have the same political form. All democracies ultimately evolve towards fascism. The distinction between "free" and "socialist" simply reflects stages in this evolution.
As for the statement you have italicized being a lie. It is one person's interpretation, and thus cannot be a lie.
Interestingly, in England, before the industrial revolution, there was a kind of de facto democracy. The king, or at a more local level, the lord had their way, but when the taxes became oppressive, or whatever, and the peasants had had enough, they rioted. The rioting was apparently more a matter of noise and work stoppage than of violence, but was persistant. Apparently, the reaction of officialdom was tolerant, they took the riots as a sign that they had gone too far and backed off. With the advent of industrialization, such unpredictable disorder was seen as too disruptive for the system and such riots were thereafter forcefully and brutally put down.
A cynic might say that those peasant had more political power than does the voter in a modern "democracy".
I can trace down my source for this, but it will be an effort.
This was the idea behind the Electoral College. It never worked and soon degenerated into representative government. As Aurelius notes, the Senate followed the same path. Over the course of the 19th century, state after state moved to direct election of senators.
Eventually we wound up with a system which favored demagoguery. All other western countries followed different paths to the same destination.
Yes, I am in favor of what Hoppe calls the natural order (he shrinks from using its proper name - anarcho-capitalism). Unfortunately, I don't have too many suggestions about how to move to it. The first step obviously is education - to fight the propaganda that democracy has anything to do with freedom or that government, especially federal government, can do anything useful for you.
Short of implementing the natural order, there are many possible steps to improving things. The first is to recognize that the FFs were wrong in one sense: direct democracy, for all its faults, is better than representative democracy. They were also right in another: local government is better than national government.
The Anti-Federalists were right. The federal government was too strong. That's why it eventually broke out of the box that the FFs tried to keep it in.
The first step is to build a confederacy, not a federation. Eliminate all direct election of anyone in Washington and throw out the devils in black robes. The only federal institution which should exist is the Senate - one representative (not two) appointed by each state. What's more, the central government should have no source of monies of its own. Only voluntary contributions from each state.
The next step is to build a mechanism for creating new states out of old ones. The current states are far too large. One of the Greeks, I think it was Aristotle, claimed that a city could not be larger than about 10,000 citizens. Otherwise it grows out of control. You might quibble about the exact number but he had the right order of magnitude. Town halls and plebecites are the place for democracy, if it has a place at all.
I have to say that I disagree with you on all these points. Money should obviously be supplied by the market. There is no reason for a federal road system. That can be handled privately or the states. Note that the roads between Canada and the US join together, despite the lack of a common authority to manage them.
Foreign policy? Bad idea. The best foreign policy is no foreign policy, as Washington and Jefferson said.
Militia? Possibly something on the Swiss model. But the reality is that, other than a couple of nukes and perhaps some anti-troop carriers, the US doesn't need any defense at all.
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