Democracy: The Problem & New Symptom – Foetal Alcohol Syndrome.

This started as merely a marker post put up for two reasons: a) for a post I’m working on regarding Chris (The Fist) Trotter, which will be published sometime over the weekend, or next Monday, and b) as a reference point to refer back to in various online ‘debates’. It's morphed into something a bit else, although I'll start with what I had in mind from inception; the central problem with democracy:

Take the case of a social democracy that consists of just ten people: let's say four are black people, and the remaining six are white. This democracy decides to hold a plebiscite on the proposition that white people shouldn't have to work, as they have an entitlement to live off the efforts of black people, which they propose to do via the instigation of a special tax on the incomes of black people.

Guess what? The proposition is won by six votes to four. A democratically made, majority decision has just taken away the liberty of black people, all in the name of the common good of the tyranny of the majority. Now, simply take away the emoting use of ‘black people’, and exchange that for ‘taxpayer’.

Further, tied lethally to the notion of democracy as a tyranny of the majority, the welfare state has over the last seventy years proven its Achilles Heel: that politicians, wanting to be ‘caring’ and ‘compassionate’, cannot help but bribe electorates over the long term with an illusory free lunch, and that over time, social democracies will, thus, create, and ultimately procreate, enough voters to be reliant on this illusion, until the economic imperative takes its ultimate, and logical course, as it’s doing now in Europe, and the US. Meaning that what started out with the best of intentions, has ended up the Gulag of Forced Altruism, with its creeping cruelty.

Note there’s a particularly annoying branch of the Left – and please don’t infer from that I belong to the conservative Right - that arrogant, smug, patronising personality who is sooo caring, clever, and morally superior to the rest of us, such as the sanctimonious Sanctuary on this thread, who says, to use the latter’s argument against me when I used just the above argument on Imperator Fish’s blog, quote:

To me your question is a nice intellectual conceit for teenage undergraduates intoxicated at the first exposure to political philosophy and worrying themselves silly at the idea of the tyranny of the majority. So to me, If you have failed to advance from that first flush of giddy outrage to a deeper understanding of democracy that is your problem, and your loss, not mine.

It is the sort of absolutist question you often get from the intellectually immature - the rhetorical equivalent of a playground "nah nah nah so there." The great strength of democracy lies in its refusal to be weighed and measured, to provide a neat tick box solution for every problem, to excuse you from the bothersome and tiresome need for debate across numerous disciplines. Your question is nonsense, since it pre-supposes democracy is as rigid and nonsensical as your own philosophy. Democracy is a living, moving, warm blooded beast, when you yearn for a triumph of the taxidermist's art.

The smarmy arrogance in the tone of this is typical. And it all begs the question, because yes, by Rand I believe in absolutes, over the evil (im)moral relativism of the Left: this ‘is’ the problem with democracy, and it's a terminal one for the civil society based on voluntarism, the evidence and the harm of which is viewable simply by looking at the facts of reality of the world we now inhabit: watch the news every night.

And it gets worse. As I’ve written before, I am under no illusion: classical liberalism is dead; I shall never be a free man - this blog is, itself, a marker, merely serving as a warning that democracy is about to get a whole lot deeper mired in the mincer of State, because the next generation is looking to be the first truly alcohol induced one, a big enough portion of which is going to be sufficiently literally retarded and violent to drive us all further down the road to serfdom as they will be incapable of looking after themselves – or, at least, that’s what people are going to think, because they are incapable, any longer, to think anything else. Previously there has been an insurmountable philosophical barrier to attaining the freer society, over the bound one, due to Gramsci in our schools, rotting the children’s minds from within, but now this goes to its inevitable conclusion: Generation Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, born of a welfare statism that has destroyed self-responsibility and self-reliance. And the final proof of where it’s all wrong? The Left’s response to the above link of the growing incidence of foetal alcohol syndrome? To attack alcohol, the product, and ultimately, my freedom to enjoy it responsibly, rather than changing the culture drinking it. For how can they attack the cause: it’s a culture their policies have created, it just took seventy years to ferment, to the stage the bottle cap has been taken off. We are the generation that starts to pay the price.

… Chris (The Fist) Trotter, coming soon.


UPDATE 1

 Just happened on a great quotation regarding the advantage a freedom stifling statism has in a democracy:

We must understand that there is an imbalance of power in the political system of any democracy in that the forces of statism have an innate advantage over the defenders of freedom. It takes but one legislative or administrative victory for statism to succeed in guiding society on an indelible path towards dependency.  We cannot perpetuate the free-market, but we can perpetuate statism by creating inveterate dependency constituencies.  Statism enjoys the inherent advantage of self-perpetuation through its own pernicious activities that engender a continued need for the government programs.