A flaw of capitalism?

[Xunzian]

I can’t say I agree with your anthropology. Or perhaps we are disagreeing on the nature of democracy? But I wouldn’t call primitive humans, modern tribal humans, non-human primates, and other non-human social animals “democratic”. Very clear hierarchies exist in all those cases. Now, it can be argued that those at the apex rule by the consent of the governed but in so doing you’ve just defined all governments as democracies and that is just confusing! Dairdo’s point on mob rule and democracies vs. republics is also well taken.

[Juggernaut]

@Xunzian

I can’t say I agree with your anthropology. Or perhaps we are disagreeing on the nature of democracy? But I wouldn’t call primitive humans, modern tribal humans, non-human primates, and other non-human social animals “democratic”. Very clear hierarchies exist in all those cases. Now, it can be argued that those at the apex rule by the consent of the governed but in so doing you’ve just defined all governments as democracies and that is just confusing! Dairdo’s point on mob rule and democracies vs. republics is also well taken.

What are you reading that gives you some notion of hierarchies???I do not see it… There were fratries, and clans and moities… Among the Iroquois, the women picked the Sachems, though every body had their say, and until they did no vote was taken, and taken again, and again, because consensus was the rule of the confederacy, as it was in most direct democracies… They did not take consent for granted as we do, but made certain of it…All Governments are forms of democracy, either more, or less…Rule of one group over another inevitably becomes tyranny…

[dreamscaper]

@Juggernaut

@Xunzian

Where is “self” in “demos”? We can retrocon Democracy to mean self-government but I don’t think that is a legitimate representation of the concept to anyone besides some modern idealists. I mean, the whole idea of self-rule is soooo 14th Amendment.

Before societies had enough wealth to divide them they were all democratic, and if it were ideal, no people would have spread out. broken out and taken over the whole habitable earth… Consensus is what separated them from us…Consensus offers protection for the individual… If his wheel isn’t greased, he does not have to come along…Primitives were able to endure life without much of resources or technology… It is because true democracy unites people aand does not divide… We think we are superior, but their societies actually produced aa superior individual, prepared to defend himself, his honor, and his people…He was a microcosm of his culture…It is no wonder that the enlightenment could see such people as noble savages…So long as a society has enough of resources and technology it can hold out against enemies… If it does not need the whole people for its defense why bother asking their opinion???In fact, the minority, and even more, the majority needs protection… We can be ruined by halfs… Look at how many people cannot bear to give any attention to politics because it takes such energy, is frustating and futile, and the stupidity is mind numbing… And those who do participate are at loggerheads with the other half… We never get a vote on any issue of merit with the exception of piddling local stuff… Paine made the argument aginst Burke of future generations being bound by the consent ot today… As he rejected it I reject it… We need consent on all the laws that are passed… We need to re- write the constitution, and give our consent for no longer time than is necessary; and we should demand consensus… Half the people are always wrong…If the bare majority can whittle away at the minority, there will always be a minority and a majority, but no rulling class will ever waste money buying a majority they do not need…This country is not simply divided, but is divided to deny the maximum number fair representation…It is no wa to govern… More countries faail out of division than fall to invaders, but our division is an invitation to attack…

Actually, if you want to talk about tribal people, I would consider their government a feudal monarchy or feudal oligarchy at best. There was and is no democracy. No votes are taken. The will of the chief is enforced in the vast majority of tribal cultures. Some share authority with the high priests/priestesses and medicine men. I would call those oligarchies, but certainly none of them were democratic. Tribes were small, so their armies were composed of all the men of the tribe. We have soldiers here too, are you implying that every person should be a soldier? In that case, you ought to have good things to say about North Korea. They are still like that. Though not ALL of the men are soldiers, most of them are, and the rest don’t eat. So the happy ones are the ones ready to go to war for their chief, Kim Jong Il and defend the honor of their “tribe”. We saw a similar thing in Japan in WW2. All of those people were ready to defend the empire down to women and children… Until they got nuked.

The difference is with tribal cultures it was much easier for the leadership to be challenged. They had a natural system of checks and balances. If the chief was unfair, somebody challenged the chief and killed him thereby becoming the new chief. In cultures where that wasn’t a tradition, uprisings would quickly take care of an unfair chief. In these cultures all that was hardly necessary however since the chief had a vested interest in the well being of the tribe. I would call it a successful monarchy. Any system of government can be successful (except perhaps true communism for economic reasons). A monarchy works if the monarch has only the needs of the people in mind. Then it is a successful monarchy. In tribal cultures this is possible since the monarch knows every man, woman, and child by name. In larger societies the monarch is too far removed from the tribe to keep their interests at heart. Unfortunately, that system is now completely dysfunctional.

As far as the voting on laws thing goes, that is too inefficient to be effective. That much was proven in ancient Greece. I DO think they should be voted on, but this is how it should go:

1. New laws should ONLY be considered, much less passed that start as petitions with X amount of signatures from legal citizens of the district in which the petition is submitted as law.

2. These laws should then go through congress and the like for approval or denial.

3. IF the laws are passed, there should be an option to vote them down if a petition with X number of signatures is lawfully submitted for a popular vote on the law.

4. Then the law can be voted down or codified depending on the result.

5. Once a law has been codified, then it can only be given a chance to be voted down with X percent of signatures from the registered voters of the entire district.

6. All laws should be able to be struck down as unconstitutional by supreme court judges who are elected by the people AND qualify for the office.

7. All lawful petitions MUST be heard and voted on by the legislators. All red tape and bureaucracies should be considered illicit, and attempts to set up such bureaucracies should result in impeachment/removal from office, possibly other penalties.

I think the merit in this system is that sometimes voters do not know about the feasibility of implementing certain laws. Citizens can’t be expected to run a government efficiently as a whole. It also takes too much time and effort to vote on every single issue and government action. Somebody has to be given the power of decisiveness for times of emergency. But all laws will still be subject to public approval or disapproval. It is the best of both worlds.

NOW… Juggernaut. Let’s talk about democracy. I want to hear what you define democracy, since what you are referring to as democracy seems to be all over the place. Can we nail it down to one definition?

…And once we have done that I want you to speak on coercion and mind control. Please explain to me how you guard against such a thing in a democracy. Voting and public opinions/beliefs can easily be coerced in modern society. Especially if the state controls the economy. The way I see it there are two options. Either the economy serves the people, or the people serve the economy. It is just a question of how much of each. I think optimally the economy would entirely serve the people. But if the economy serves the state, then the people also serve the state via the economy. We are seeing that now with the recent economic 911 and the compulsory bailouts/scare tactics. “Give us the money, or the economy gets it!”. Trillions of dollars later here we are. That was a result of the state controlling the economy. I doubt that is what you are seeking, but that is the result of communist economic policies and federal market regulation in general. Shouldn’t the market be regulated by the people, not the state? Strong private interests can be controlled by the people too. They just have to be willing to do something about it, hence my buyers unions.

[dreamscaper]

@Dairdo

@dreamscaper

Democracy has been subverted over and over. It was a good idea, but we need something better. First of all, one problem with democracy is that your rights can be voted away. If 50.1% of the people vote to take away freedom of speech and religion, guess what? No freedom of speech and religion.

You’re referring to what Jefferson et al. referred to as a “tyranny of the majority”. They were accutely aware of the problem and built protections into the Constitution to specifically restrict the ability of a legislature to “vote” away rights. Hence the notion of “inalienable” rights.

It is not a failing of the Constitution - or of the democratic ideal; rather, it is a failing of morality. A failure of the individual’s will to act morally within the spirit of the founding principles of the Constitution - which has translated over time into a sanction of corruption by the statist, collectivist, opportunists. The majority of Americans accepted their new Constitution in form, but not in spirit. In spirit, they held onto the Christian notions of self-sacrifice and subordination to a higher authority.

On another matter…

The OP opined that: “Common goals unite us; competition drives us apart”.

I disagree. Common goals do unite “us” - if by “us” you mean any group of individuals who choose to come together in pursuit of a single objective. However, it is through the competition to complete or achieve the objective from which we each individually derive our unique creativity and tap potential.

We all choose to live a life of interdependency on other individuals because it makes rational sense from a perspective of our individual long term self interests. I have no desire to spend 100 years learning the theory and then the application necessary to produce all of the goods and services me and mine might require. It is infinitely more rewarding to rely on the individual expertise of others - thereby freeing up my time to pursue what I value, what my interests are. It makes rational sense to live this way. The “social organization” is a by-product of our individual reason that directs us to leverage the skills of others to our benefit.

I DO agree with you about morality, but I think that individuals could have been nudged in that direction a little better. Instead, they were nudged little by little, and finally full-forcedly shoved in the opposite direction by controlling interests. There are after all, enemies of the constitution. People who revile it of course look for secret means to subvert it. You have to use the people for that, and they did. So while it was a failure indeed by the people, it was somewhat of a failure on the part of the constitution. Not every method of subversion was calculated by the framers, and hence now it has been subverted. Where it fell short was empowering the people to stand up for what is right. I think that is where it could use some reworking. It was an attitude of the age in which it was founded that originally empowered the people. But after a few generations that attitude dissipated. What is needed is something that will instill that attitude into the people. There are a few obvious means by which this could be accomplished. As I said, I think the constitution was a beta model. That was the best they could do with the knowledge and smarts that they had at the time. If they knew what we knew now, don’t you think they might have written it differently?

[Juggernaut]

@dreamscaper

@Juggernaut

@Xunzian

Where is “self” in “demos”? We can retrocon Democracy to mean self-government but I don’t think that is a legitimate representation of the concept to anyone besides some modern idealists. I mean, the whole idea of self-rule is soooo 14th Amendment.

Before societies had enough wealth to divide them they were all democratic, and if it were ideal, no people would have spread out. broken out and taken over the whole habitable earth… Consensus is what separated them from us…Consensus offers protection for the individual… If his wheel isn’t greased, he does not have to come along…Primitives were able to endure life without much of resources or technology… It is because true democracy unites people aand does not divide… We think we are superior, but their societies actually produced aa superior individual, prepared to defend himself, his honor, and his people…He was a microcosm of his culture…It is no wonder that the enlightenment could see such people as noble savages…So long as a society has enough of resources and technology it can hold out against enemies… If it does not need the whole people for its defense why bother asking their opinion???In fact, the minority, and even more, the majority needs protection… We can be ruined by halfs… Look at how many people cannot bear to give any attention to politics because it takes such energy, is frustating and futile, and the stupidity is mind numbing… And those who do participate are at loggerheads with the other half… We never get a vote on any issue of merit with the exception of piddling local stuff… Paine made the argument aginst Burke of future generations being bound by the consent ot today… As he rejected it I reject it… We need consent on all the laws that are passed… We need to re- write the constitution, and give our consent for no longer time than is necessary; and we should demand consensus… Half the people are always wrong…If the bare majority can whittle away at the minority, there will always be a minority and a majority, but no rulling class will ever waste money buying a majority they do not need…This country is not simply divided, but is divided to deny the maximum number fair representation…It is no wa to govern… More countries faail out of division than fall to invaders, but our division is an invitation to attack…

Actually, if you want to talk about tribal people, I would consider their government a feudal monarchy or feudal oligarchy at best. There was and is no democracy. No votes are taken. The will of the chief is enforced in the vast majority of tribal cultures. Some share authority with the high priests/priestesses and medicine men. I would call those oligarchies, but certainly none of them were democratic. Tribes were small, so their armies were composed of all the men of the tribe. We have soldiers here too, are you implying that every person should be a soldier? In that case, you ought to have good things to say about North Korea. They are still like that. Though not ALL of the men are soldiers, most of them are, and the rest don’t eat. So the happy ones are the ones ready to go to war for their chief, Kim Jong Il and defend the honor of their “tribe”. We saw a similar thing in Japan in WW2. All of those people were ready to defend the empire down to women and children… Until they got nuked.

The difference is with tribal cultures it was much easier for the leadership to be challenged. They had a natural system of checks and balances. If the chief was unfair, somebody challenged the chief and killed him thereby becoming the new chief. In cultures where that wasn’t a tradition, uprisings would quickly take care of an unfair chief. In these cultures all that was hardly necessary however since the chief had a vested interest in the well being of the tribe. I would call it a successful monarchy. Any system of government can be successful (except perhaps true communism for economic reasons). A monarchy works if the monarch has only the needs of the people in mind. Then it is a successful monarchy. In tribal cultures this is possible since the monarch knows every man, woman, and child by name. In larger societies the monarch is too far removed from the tribe to keep their interests at heart. Unfortunately, that system is now completely dysfunctional.

As far as the voting on laws thing goes, that is too inefficient to be effective. That much was proven in ancient Greece. I DO think they should be voted on, but this is how it should go:

1. New laws should ONLY be considered, much less passed that start as petitions with X amount of signatures from legal citizens of the district in which the petition is submitted as law.

2. These laws should then go through congress and the like for approval or denial.

3. IF the laws are passed, there should be an option to vote them down if a petition with X number of signatures is lawfully submitted for a popular vote on the law.

4. Then the law can be voted down or codified depending on the result.

5. Once a law has been codified, then it can only be given a chance to be voted down with X percent of signatures from the registered voters of the entire district.

6. All laws should be able to be struck down as unconstitutional by supreme court judges who are elected by the people AND qualify for the office.

7. All lawful petitions MUST be heard and voted on by the legislators. All red tape and bureaucracies should be considered illicit, and attempts to set up such bureaucracies should result in impeachment/removal from office, possibly other penalties.

I think the merit in this system is that sometimes voters do not know about the feasibility of implementing certain laws. Citizens can’t be expected to run a government efficiently as a whole. It also takes too much time and effort to vote on every single issue and government action. Somebody has to be given the power of decisiveness for times of emergency. But all laws will still be subject to public approval or disapproval. It is the best of both worlds.

NOW… Juggernaut. Let’s talk about democracy. I want to hear what you define democracy, since what you are referring to as democracy seems to be all over the place. Can we nail it down to one definition?

…And once we have done that I want you to speak on coercion and mind control. Please explain to me how you guard against such a thing in a democracy. Voting and public opinions/beliefs can easily be coerced in modern society. Especially if the state controls the economy. The way I see it there are two options. Either the economy serves the people, or the people serve the economy. It is just a question of how much of each. I think optimally the economy would entirely serve the people. But if the economy serves the state, then the people also serve the state via the economy. We are seeing that now with the recent economic 911 and the compulsory bailouts/scare tactics. “Give us the money, or the economy gets it!”. Trillions of dollars later here we are. That was a result of the state controlling the economy. I doubt that is what you are seeking, but that is the result of communist economic policies and federal market regulation in general. Shouldn’t the market be regulated by the people, not the state? Strong private interests can be controlled by the people too. They just have to be willing to do something about it, hence my buyers unions.

Why not read the first book on the subject… Read some Morgan on all ancient society, or cadwalider Colden, I think that is the name, on the Iroquois…

Democracies have many forms, but the most pure are found among primitives…There is some democracy even in slavery since no person can be made a slave against his will…The difference is the notion of consensus, that all have the right to consent to or deny any change under consideration, and it takes everybody to make change…Just as democracy is primarily defensive because it makes each person his own general, able to figure things out for himself, aware of his own rights, and in possession of them so other forms find democracy cumbersome…That is why the war chiefs in ancient society, and the why of our president… As we speak, and since this country was formed, we have lost representation, which means the loss of our democracy…We started out with one representative for ever thirty K, and now have one representative for every 600K…It is no wonder the democracy we have is unresponsive and incompetent…Can one represent four as well as two??? Can anyone represent two hundred as well as one hundred… Conflict of interest is build into the system…All the districts are divided…The public is at loggerheads not knowing who to trust and trusting no one…And the house is free to do as it wants because bound up, we cannot stop them…The object of deomcracy is not a free government, but a free people, and if we cannot control our affairs, and have absolute power in our own affairs so long as they do not become the affairs of another then we have no democracy…It is not offensive even to ones own people…It defends all, even from internal enemies…

[Xunzian]

“There is some democracy even in X since no person can be made an X against his will”

Let’s look at this sentence here. In your response, you had X as “slavery” and “slave”. Could X be replaced with Monarchy/royal subject? It would seem to hold with what you are saying. So then everything becomes a democracy, precisely the pitfall I warned against earlier. Your linguistic twisting of democracy agrees with this line of thinking. We need to clear up this funk before we can really proceed with the discussion.

[Juggernaut]

@Xunzian

“There is some democracy even in X since no person can be made an X against his will”

Let’s look at this sentence here. In your response, you had X as “slavery” and “slave”. Could X be replaced with Monarchy/royal subject? It would seem to hold with what you are saying. So then everything becomes a democracy, precisely the pitfall I warned against earlier. Your linguistic twisting of democracy agrees with this line of thinking. We need to clear up this funk before we can really proceed with the discussion.

Slaves and slavery cannot be the same thing, that is: X…One is conditional upon the other…

Some measure of consent is essential to all the conditions of man, even unequal relationships as they often are in marriage… Look at the Native Americans for example…If cut loose they would run away… And if they were not they would starve themselves to death… To allow themselves to be made slaves they understood as a dishonor to all their kind…In fact, they could be cut up and fried before their own eyes and never complain out of regard for their own honor and the honor of their people…Tyranny, and it has been common has had an element of democracy that is often greater than republics… It was the mass of free citizens in the city of Rome who were the power behind Caesar and his relatives the Graachi…The plebicite of Napoleon was likely a fraud, but if so their was not much of complaint…