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Democracy: The Bigger It Gets, the Worse It Gets
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New York Libertarians
Mar 31, 2019, 6:12:13 AM3/31/19
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Ördög
Mar 31, 2019, 3:34:56 PM3/31/19
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WARNING!
Stupid "zerohedge" anti-Democracy Lie-bertarian click bait spam ===>
flushed
Only Usenet illiterate idiots would fall for that.
And this typical lazy poster lie-bertarian anti-demopcracy wanker crap
was brought to you again by this community hating, Trump supporting,
disgruntled, white, aging and Alzheimer ridden upper-middle-class,
conservative-capitalist-neo-lie-beral-neo-lie-bertarian wealth-addicted,
ego-maniac and utterly sociopathic and social Darwinist Google Groups
lowlife creep.
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
*Why libertarians apologize for autocracy*
_The experience of every modern democratic nation-state proves that
libertarianism is incompatible with democracy_
/by Michael Lind/
Source:
<https://www.salon.com/2011/08/30/lind_libertariansim/>
"Having denounced liberals as crypto-communists for half a century during
the Cold War, the American right now routinely accuses the center-left of
being fascist. This libel was given currency in Jonah Goldberg's 2009
book "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From
Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." From the support of a few
progressives a century ago for eugenics, and expressions of admiration by
a few 1920s liberals for Mussolini’s ability to make the trains run on
time, Goldberg and others on the right have crafted the latest in a
series of right-wing conspiracy theories about American history, this one
claiming that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt deliberately set the
U.S. on the road to an American version of Mussolini’s corporate state.
Given their professed interest in admirers of Mussolini, it is curious
that American conservatives and libertarians have not seen fit to discuss
the view of fascism held by one of the heroes of modern American
libertarianism, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. In his book
"Liberalism," published in 1927 after Mussolini had seized power in
Italy, Mises wrote:
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the
establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that
their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The
merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in
history.
Friedrich von Hayek, who was, along with von Mises, one of the patron
saints of modern libertarianism, was as infatuated with the Chilean
dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet as von Mises was with Mussolini, according
to Greg Grandin:
Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago
professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state planning
would produce not "freedom and prosperity" but "bondage and misery,"
visited Pinochet’s Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he
held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even
recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market
revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile’s 1982 financial
collapse, agreed that Chile represented a "remarkable success" but
believed that Britain’s "democratic institutions and the need for a high
degree of consent" make "some of the measures" taken by Pinochet "quite
unacceptable."
Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom,
who would rule as a dictator only for a "transitional period," only as
long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. "My personal
preference," he told a Chilean interviewer, "leans toward a liberal [i.e.
libertarian] dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government
devoid of liberalism." In a letter to the London Times he defended the
junta, reporting that he had "not been able to find a single person even
in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much
greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende." Of course, the
thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet’s regime
weren’t talking.
The Pinochet dictatorship was admired by the right in the U.S. and
Britain for turning Chile’s economic policy over to disciples of Milton
Friedman and the University of Chicago, who inflicted disastrous social
experiments like the privatization of social security on Chile’s
repressed population. Following the libertarian reforms, the Chilean
economy collapsed in 1982, forcing the nationalization of the banking
system and government intervention in industry. According to Grandin:
While he was in Chile Friedman gave a speech titled "The Fragility
of Freedom" where he described the "role in the destruction of a free
society that was played by the emergence of the welfare state." Chile’s
present difficulties, he argued, "were due almost entirely to the forty-
year trend toward collectivism, socialism and the welfare state . . . a
course that would lead to coercion rather than freedom."
Friedman politely neglected to mention the lack of political and civil
liberty under the Pinochet regime. Many of its victims were drugged and
taken in military airplanes to be dropped over the South Atlantic, with
their bellies slit open while they were still alive so that their bodies
would not float and be discovered.
One of the members of Pinochet’s cabinet, Jose Piñera, has enjoyed a
second career at the leading American libertarian think tank, the Cato
Institute, and is credited with having influenced George W. Bush’s failed
attempt to partly privatize Social Security in America. The Cato website
says:
Distinguished senior fellow José Piñera is co-chairman of Cato's
Project on Social Security Choice and Founder and President of the
International Center for Pension Reform. Formerly Chile's Secretary of
Labor and Social Security, he was the architect of the country's
successful reform of its pension system. As Secretary of Labor, Piñera
also designed the labor laws that introduced flexibility to the Chilean
labor market and, as Secretary of Mining, he was responsible for the
constitutional law that established private property rights in Chilean
mines.
Piñera, the brother of Chile’s billionaire president Sebastian Piñera,
has a personal website in which he claims that he played a major role in
the transition to democracy in Chile. Piñera’s portrayal of himself as a
champion of democracy is somewhat undercut on the same Web page by
several defenses of Pinochet's regime that he includes, including this
one by a writer in an Australian magazine:
Indeed, in all 17 years of military rule, the total number of dead
and missing -- according to the official Retting Commission -- was 2,279.
Were there abuses? Were there real victims? Without the slightest doubt.
A war on terror tends to be a dirty war.
Still, in the case of Chile, and contrary to news reports, the number
of actual victims was small.
The Cato Institute’s problem with democracy is not limited to its
appointment of a former functionary of a mass murderer to direct its
retirement policy program. Cato Unbound recently hosted a debate over
whether libertarianism is compatible with democracy. Milton Friedman’s
grandson Patri concluded that it is not:
*Democracy Is Not The Answer*
Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but
unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state. It has
substantial systemic flaws, which are well-covered elsewhere,[2] and it
poses major problems specifically for libertarians:
1) Most people are not by nature libertarians. David Nolan reports
that surveys show at most 16% of people have libertarian beliefs. Nolan,
the man who founded the Libertarian Party back in 1971, now calls for
libertarians to give up on the strategy of electing candidates! …
2) Democracy is rigged against libertarians. Candidates bid for
electoral victory partly by selling future political favors to raise
funds and votes for their campaigns. Libertarians (and other honest
candidates) who will not abuse their office can't sell favors, thus have
fewer resources to campaign with, and so have a huge intrinsic
disadvantage in an election.
In his recommendations for further reading, Friedman included the
Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book "Democracy: The God That
Failed," which appeared in 2001, following the fall of the Berlin Wall,
during the greatest wave of global democratization in history. In his
Cato Unbound manifesto, Friedman called on his fellow libertarians to
give up on the whole idea of the democratic nation-state and join his
movement in favor of "seasteading," or the creation of new, microscopic
sovereign states on repurposed oil derricks, where people who think that
"Atlas Shrugged" is really cool can be in the majority for a change.
In a similar spirit, a libertarian economics blogger named Arnold Kling
has proposed his own alternative to democracy, which he calls
"competitive government":
In this essay, I will suggest that competitive government might be
better than democratic government at satisfying the desires of the
governed. In democratic government, people take jurisdictions as given,
and they elect leaders. In competitive government, people take leaders as
given, and they select jurisdictions.
When it comes to American history, libertarians tend retrospectively to
side with the Confederacy against the Union. Yes, yes, the South had
slavery -- but it also had low tariffs, while Abraham Lincoln's free labor
North was protectionist. Surely the tariff was a greater evil than
slavery.
The posthumous induction of Jefferson Davis into the libertarian hall of
fame was too much for David Boaz, a vice president of Cato. In a 2010
essay in Reason magazine titled "Up From Slavery: There’s No Such Thing
as a Golden Age of Lost Liberty," Boaz observed that even whites in the
antebellum North "did not actually live in a free society ... Liberalism
seeks not just to liberate this or that person, but to create a rule of
law exemplifying equal freedom. By that standard, even the plantation
owners did not live in a free society, nor even did people in the free
states."
Boaz asked his fellow libertarians, "If you had to choose, would you
rather live in a country with a department of labor and even an income
tax or a Dred Scott decision and a Fugitive Slave Act?" It says something
that in 2009 this question stirred up a controversy on the libertarian
right.
Libertarians and conservatives, to be sure, can point to many examples of
naive liberals in the last century who embarrassed themselves by praising
this or that squalid, tyrannical communist regime, from the Soviet Union
and communist China to petty police states like North Korea, communist
Vietnam and Castro’s Cuba. But the apologists for tyranny on the left
were always opposed by anti-communist liberals and anti-communist
democratic socialists. Where were the anti-authoritarian libertarians,
denouncing libertarian fellow travelers of Pinochet like von Hayek and
Milton Friedman?
For that matter, where was the libertarian right during the great
struggles for individual liberty in America in the last half-century? The
libertarian movement has been conspicuously absent from the campaigns for
civil rights for nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians. Most, if not all,
libertarians support sexual and reproductive freedom (though Rand Paul
has expressed doubts about federal civil rights legislation). But civil
libertarian activists are found overwhelmingly on the left. Their right-
wing brethren have been concerned with issues more important than civil
rights, voting rights, abuses by police and the military, and the
subordination of politics to religion -- issues like the campaign to
expand human freedom by turning highways over to toll-extracting private
corporations and the crusade to funnel money from Social Security to Wall
Street brokerage firms.
While progressives betray their principles when they apologize for
autocracy, libertarians do not. Today’s libertarians claim to be the
heirs of the classical liberals of the 19th century. Without exception
the great thinkers of classical liberalism, like Benjamin Constant,
Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Stuart Mill, viewed universal suffrage
democracy as a threat to property rights and capitalism. Mill favored
educational qualifications for voters, like the "literacy tests" used to
disfranchise most blacks and many whites in the South before the 1960s.
After the Civil War, Lord Acton wrote to Robert E. Lee, commiserating
with him on the defeat of the Confederacy.
In a letter to an American in 1857, Macaulay wrote:
Dear Sir: You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion
of Mr. JEFFERSON, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that
I never wrote a line, and that I never, in Parliament, in conversation,
or even on the hustings -- a place where it is the fashion to court the
populace -- uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme
authority in a State ought to be intrusted to the majority of citizens
told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part
of society. I have long been convinced that institutions purely
democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or
both.
By "purely democratic" Macaulay meant universal suffrage; he opposed
democracy even with checks and balances and written constitutions.
It is quite plain that your Government will never be able to restrain
a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the
Government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at
its mercy. The day will come when, in the State of New-York, a multitude
of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to
have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible
to doubt what sort of Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a
statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict
observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the
tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be
permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands
of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates
is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for
more bread?
Macaulay’s solution was to limit voting rights to those who drink
champagne and ride in carriages, on the proto-Reaganite theory that some
of their wealth would trickle down to people with hungry, crying
children, "none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to
have more than half a dinner."
The history of democratic nation-states since the 19th century proves
that Macaulay, and von Mises, and Hayek, as well as lesser lights like
Patri Friedman, have been right to argue that democracy is incompatible
with libertarianism. Every modern, advanced democracy, including the
United States, devotes between a third and half of its GDP to government,
in both direct spending on public services like defense and transfer
payments. Given the power to vote, most populations will not only vote
for some system of government-backed social insurance, but also for all
sorts of interventions in individual behavior that libertarians object
to, from laws banning nudity in public to laws mandating that people
support their children, do not torture or neglect their pets and water
their lawns during droughts according to scheduled rationing.
Unfortunately for libertarians who, like Hayek, prefer libertarian
dictatorships to welfare-state democracies, even modern authoritarians
reject the small-government creed. The most successful authoritarian
capitalist regimes, such as today’s China and South Korea and Taiwan
before their recent transitions to democracy, have been highly
interventionist in economics, promoting economic growth by means of state-
controlled banking, state-owned enterprises, government promotion of
cartels, suppression of wages and consumption, tariffs and nontariff
barriers to imports, toleration of intellectual piracy, massive
infrastructure projects to help industry, and subsidies to manufacturers
in the form of artificially cheap raw materials, energy and land.
The dread of democracy by libertarians and classical liberals is
justified. Libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy. Most
libertarians have made it clear which of the two they prefer. The only
question that remains to be settled is why anyone should pay attention to
libertarians.
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
It is quite obvious that the hypocritical capitalist conservative Lie-
bertarians want to get rid of democracy in order to introduce their
fascist dystopia, the ultimate form of autocracy run by the privileged
super rich ruling over everyone else.
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
--
Ördög (Your newsgroup Devil in service of maintaining sanity in Usenet)
*What's wrong with libertarianism*
"That perfect liberty they sigh for-- the liberty of making slaves of
other people--
Jefferson never thought of; their own father never thought of; they never
thought of themselves, a year ago."
~ Abraham Lincoln ~
Stupid "zerohedge" anti-Democracy Lie-bertarian click bait spam ===>
flushed
Only Usenet illiterate idiots would fall for that.
And this typical lazy poster lie-bertarian anti-demopcracy wanker crap
was brought to you again by this community hating, Trump supporting,
disgruntled, white, aging and Alzheimer ridden upper-middle-class,
conservative-capitalist-neo-lie-beral-neo-lie-bertarian wealth-addicted,
ego-maniac and utterly sociopathic and social Darwinist Google Groups
lowlife creep.
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
*Why libertarians apologize for autocracy*
_The experience of every modern democratic nation-state proves that
libertarianism is incompatible with democracy_
/by Michael Lind/
Source:
<https://www.salon.com/2011/08/30/lind_libertariansim/>
"Having denounced liberals as crypto-communists for half a century during
the Cold War, the American right now routinely accuses the center-left of
being fascist. This libel was given currency in Jonah Goldberg's 2009
book "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From
Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." From the support of a few
progressives a century ago for eugenics, and expressions of admiration by
a few 1920s liberals for Mussolini’s ability to make the trains run on
time, Goldberg and others on the right have crafted the latest in a
series of right-wing conspiracy theories about American history, this one
claiming that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt deliberately set the
U.S. on the road to an American version of Mussolini’s corporate state.
Given their professed interest in admirers of Mussolini, it is curious
that American conservatives and libertarians have not seen fit to discuss
the view of fascism held by one of the heroes of modern American
libertarianism, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. In his book
"Liberalism," published in 1927 after Mussolini had seized power in
Italy, Mises wrote:
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the
establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that
their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The
merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in
history.
Friedrich von Hayek, who was, along with von Mises, one of the patron
saints of modern libertarianism, was as infatuated with the Chilean
dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet as von Mises was with Mussolini, according
to Greg Grandin:
Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago
professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state planning
would produce not "freedom and prosperity" but "bondage and misery,"
visited Pinochet’s Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he
held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even
recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market
revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile’s 1982 financial
collapse, agreed that Chile represented a "remarkable success" but
believed that Britain’s "democratic institutions and the need for a high
degree of consent" make "some of the measures" taken by Pinochet "quite
unacceptable."
Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom,
who would rule as a dictator only for a "transitional period," only as
long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. "My personal
preference," he told a Chilean interviewer, "leans toward a liberal [i.e.
libertarian] dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government
devoid of liberalism." In a letter to the London Times he defended the
junta, reporting that he had "not been able to find a single person even
in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much
greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende." Of course, the
thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet’s regime
weren’t talking.
The Pinochet dictatorship was admired by the right in the U.S. and
Britain for turning Chile’s economic policy over to disciples of Milton
Friedman and the University of Chicago, who inflicted disastrous social
experiments like the privatization of social security on Chile’s
repressed population. Following the libertarian reforms, the Chilean
economy collapsed in 1982, forcing the nationalization of the banking
system and government intervention in industry. According to Grandin:
While he was in Chile Friedman gave a speech titled "The Fragility
of Freedom" where he described the "role in the destruction of a free
society that was played by the emergence of the welfare state." Chile’s
present difficulties, he argued, "were due almost entirely to the forty-
year trend toward collectivism, socialism and the welfare state . . . a
course that would lead to coercion rather than freedom."
Friedman politely neglected to mention the lack of political and civil
liberty under the Pinochet regime. Many of its victims were drugged and
taken in military airplanes to be dropped over the South Atlantic, with
their bellies slit open while they were still alive so that their bodies
would not float and be discovered.
One of the members of Pinochet’s cabinet, Jose Piñera, has enjoyed a
second career at the leading American libertarian think tank, the Cato
Institute, and is credited with having influenced George W. Bush’s failed
attempt to partly privatize Social Security in America. The Cato website
says:
Distinguished senior fellow José Piñera is co-chairman of Cato's
Project on Social Security Choice and Founder and President of the
International Center for Pension Reform. Formerly Chile's Secretary of
Labor and Social Security, he was the architect of the country's
successful reform of its pension system. As Secretary of Labor, Piñera
also designed the labor laws that introduced flexibility to the Chilean
labor market and, as Secretary of Mining, he was responsible for the
constitutional law that established private property rights in Chilean
mines.
Piñera, the brother of Chile’s billionaire president Sebastian Piñera,
has a personal website in which he claims that he played a major role in
the transition to democracy in Chile. Piñera’s portrayal of himself as a
champion of democracy is somewhat undercut on the same Web page by
several defenses of Pinochet's regime that he includes, including this
one by a writer in an Australian magazine:
Indeed, in all 17 years of military rule, the total number of dead
and missing -- according to the official Retting Commission -- was 2,279.
Were there abuses? Were there real victims? Without the slightest doubt.
A war on terror tends to be a dirty war.
Still, in the case of Chile, and contrary to news reports, the number
of actual victims was small.
The Cato Institute’s problem with democracy is not limited to its
appointment of a former functionary of a mass murderer to direct its
retirement policy program. Cato Unbound recently hosted a debate over
whether libertarianism is compatible with democracy. Milton Friedman’s
grandson Patri concluded that it is not:
*Democracy Is Not The Answer*
Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but
unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state. It has
substantial systemic flaws, which are well-covered elsewhere,[2] and it
poses major problems specifically for libertarians:
1) Most people are not by nature libertarians. David Nolan reports
that surveys show at most 16% of people have libertarian beliefs. Nolan,
the man who founded the Libertarian Party back in 1971, now calls for
libertarians to give up on the strategy of electing candidates! …
2) Democracy is rigged against libertarians. Candidates bid for
electoral victory partly by selling future political favors to raise
funds and votes for their campaigns. Libertarians (and other honest
candidates) who will not abuse their office can't sell favors, thus have
fewer resources to campaign with, and so have a huge intrinsic
disadvantage in an election.
In his recommendations for further reading, Friedman included the
Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book "Democracy: The God That
Failed," which appeared in 2001, following the fall of the Berlin Wall,
during the greatest wave of global democratization in history. In his
Cato Unbound manifesto, Friedman called on his fellow libertarians to
give up on the whole idea of the democratic nation-state and join his
movement in favor of "seasteading," or the creation of new, microscopic
sovereign states on repurposed oil derricks, where people who think that
"Atlas Shrugged" is really cool can be in the majority for a change.
In a similar spirit, a libertarian economics blogger named Arnold Kling
has proposed his own alternative to democracy, which he calls
"competitive government":
In this essay, I will suggest that competitive government might be
better than democratic government at satisfying the desires of the
governed. In democratic government, people take jurisdictions as given,
and they elect leaders. In competitive government, people take leaders as
given, and they select jurisdictions.
When it comes to American history, libertarians tend retrospectively to
side with the Confederacy against the Union. Yes, yes, the South had
slavery -- but it also had low tariffs, while Abraham Lincoln's free labor
North was protectionist. Surely the tariff was a greater evil than
slavery.
The posthumous induction of Jefferson Davis into the libertarian hall of
fame was too much for David Boaz, a vice president of Cato. In a 2010
essay in Reason magazine titled "Up From Slavery: There’s No Such Thing
as a Golden Age of Lost Liberty," Boaz observed that even whites in the
antebellum North "did not actually live in a free society ... Liberalism
seeks not just to liberate this or that person, but to create a rule of
law exemplifying equal freedom. By that standard, even the plantation
owners did not live in a free society, nor even did people in the free
states."
Boaz asked his fellow libertarians, "If you had to choose, would you
rather live in a country with a department of labor and even an income
tax or a Dred Scott decision and a Fugitive Slave Act?" It says something
that in 2009 this question stirred up a controversy on the libertarian
right.
Libertarians and conservatives, to be sure, can point to many examples of
naive liberals in the last century who embarrassed themselves by praising
this or that squalid, tyrannical communist regime, from the Soviet Union
and communist China to petty police states like North Korea, communist
Vietnam and Castro’s Cuba. But the apologists for tyranny on the left
were always opposed by anti-communist liberals and anti-communist
democratic socialists. Where were the anti-authoritarian libertarians,
denouncing libertarian fellow travelers of Pinochet like von Hayek and
Milton Friedman?
For that matter, where was the libertarian right during the great
struggles for individual liberty in America in the last half-century? The
libertarian movement has been conspicuously absent from the campaigns for
civil rights for nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians. Most, if not all,
libertarians support sexual and reproductive freedom (though Rand Paul
has expressed doubts about federal civil rights legislation). But civil
libertarian activists are found overwhelmingly on the left. Their right-
wing brethren have been concerned with issues more important than civil
rights, voting rights, abuses by police and the military, and the
subordination of politics to religion -- issues like the campaign to
expand human freedom by turning highways over to toll-extracting private
corporations and the crusade to funnel money from Social Security to Wall
Street brokerage firms.
While progressives betray their principles when they apologize for
autocracy, libertarians do not. Today’s libertarians claim to be the
heirs of the classical liberals of the 19th century. Without exception
the great thinkers of classical liberalism, like Benjamin Constant,
Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Stuart Mill, viewed universal suffrage
democracy as a threat to property rights and capitalism. Mill favored
educational qualifications for voters, like the "literacy tests" used to
disfranchise most blacks and many whites in the South before the 1960s.
After the Civil War, Lord Acton wrote to Robert E. Lee, commiserating
with him on the defeat of the Confederacy.
In a letter to an American in 1857, Macaulay wrote:
Dear Sir: You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion
of Mr. JEFFERSON, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that
I never wrote a line, and that I never, in Parliament, in conversation,
or even on the hustings -- a place where it is the fashion to court the
populace -- uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme
authority in a State ought to be intrusted to the majority of citizens
told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part
of society. I have long been convinced that institutions purely
democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or
both.
By "purely democratic" Macaulay meant universal suffrage; he opposed
democracy even with checks and balances and written constitutions.
It is quite plain that your Government will never be able to restrain
a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the
Government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at
its mercy. The day will come when, in the State of New-York, a multitude
of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to
have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible
to doubt what sort of Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a
statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict
observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the
tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be
permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands
of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates
is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for
more bread?
Macaulay’s solution was to limit voting rights to those who drink
champagne and ride in carriages, on the proto-Reaganite theory that some
of their wealth would trickle down to people with hungry, crying
children, "none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to
have more than half a dinner."
The history of democratic nation-states since the 19th century proves
that Macaulay, and von Mises, and Hayek, as well as lesser lights like
Patri Friedman, have been right to argue that democracy is incompatible
with libertarianism. Every modern, advanced democracy, including the
United States, devotes between a third and half of its GDP to government,
in both direct spending on public services like defense and transfer
payments. Given the power to vote, most populations will not only vote
for some system of government-backed social insurance, but also for all
sorts of interventions in individual behavior that libertarians object
to, from laws banning nudity in public to laws mandating that people
support their children, do not torture or neglect their pets and water
their lawns during droughts according to scheduled rationing.
Unfortunately for libertarians who, like Hayek, prefer libertarian
dictatorships to welfare-state democracies, even modern authoritarians
reject the small-government creed. The most successful authoritarian
capitalist regimes, such as today’s China and South Korea and Taiwan
before their recent transitions to democracy, have been highly
interventionist in economics, promoting economic growth by means of state-
controlled banking, state-owned enterprises, government promotion of
cartels, suppression of wages and consumption, tariffs and nontariff
barriers to imports, toleration of intellectual piracy, massive
infrastructure projects to help industry, and subsidies to manufacturers
in the form of artificially cheap raw materials, energy and land.
The dread of democracy by libertarians and classical liberals is
justified. Libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy. Most
libertarians have made it clear which of the two they prefer. The only
question that remains to be settled is why anyone should pay attention to
libertarians.
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
It is quite obvious that the hypocritical capitalist conservative Lie-
bertarians want to get rid of democracy in order to introduce their
fascist dystopia, the ultimate form of autocracy run by the privileged
super rich ruling over everyone else.
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
$ $$$ $$$$$$$ $$$$$$$$$$$$ * $-hoarding = 0 happiness *
--
Ördög (Your newsgroup Devil in service of maintaining sanity in Usenet)
*What's wrong with libertarianism*
"That perfect liberty they sigh for-- the liberty of making slaves of
other people--
Jefferson never thought of; their own father never thought of; they never
thought of themselves, a year ago."
~ Abraham Lincoln ~
New York Libertarians
Mar 31, 2019, 4:49:32 PM3/31/19
to
Libertarians are not paid attention to. Libertarians are incompatible with big government. Why? The politically relevant fact of the matter is - Plunder is more popular than liberty.
This is the dilemma.
http://www.endit.info/Reality.shtml
It is also why we see government failure and social conflict all around us.
http://www.endit.info/Cracks.shtml
Libertarians had nothing to do with this as they are politically irrelevant. A resurgence of libertarian values will be seen once nothing is left to plunder.
http://www.endit.info/Cycle.shtml
This is the dilemma.
http://www.endit.info/Reality.shtml
It is also why we see government failure and social conflict all around us.
http://www.endit.info/Cracks.shtml
Libertarians had nothing to do with this as they are politically irrelevant. A resurgence of libertarian values will be seen once nothing is left to plunder.
http://www.endit.info/Cycle.shtml
Ördög
Mar 31, 2019, 7:48:25 PM3/31/19
to
WARNING!
Yeah! Huge "endit.info" Lie-bertarian click bait spam dump===> flushed
Only Usenet illiterate idiots would fall for that.
And this typical lazy poster uncommented far-right lie-bertarian apologist
linkspam was brought to you again by this community
be exposed as nothing but ideological hypocrisy driven by white and
filthy rich upper class creeps bitterly hating everyone below their level
of wealth.
Fuck your "endit" crap.
Yeah! Huge "endit.info" Lie-bertarian click bait spam dump===> flushed
Only Usenet illiterate idiots would fall for that.
linkspam was brought to you again by this community
hating, Trump supporting, disgruntled, white, aging and Alzheimer ridden
upper-middle-class, conservative-capitalist-neo-lie-beral-neo-lie-
bertarian wealth-addicted, ego-maniac and utterly sociopathic and social
Darwinist Google Groups lowlife creep.
In the end the capitalist conservative lie-bertarian agenda will always
upper-middle-class, conservative-capitalist-neo-lie-beral-neo-lie-
bertarian wealth-addicted, ego-maniac and utterly sociopathic and social
Darwinist Google Groups lowlife creep.
be exposed as nothing but ideological hypocrisy driven by white and
filthy rich upper class creeps bitterly hating everyone below their level
of wealth.
Fuck your "endit" crap.
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