Category Archives: Democracy

Delusions Of Democracy

Classical Liberalism, Democracy, Elections, Middle East, South-Africa, States' Rights, Taxation

We now have some idea of the strength of Egyptian discontent, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: “22 million …—a large number considering Egypt’s estimated population of 93 million people.” The numbers are derived not from a poll, but from revelations about a “signature-gathering campaign called ‘Tamarod’ or ‘Rebel.'”

Needless to say, this does not constitute good data about public opinion in Egypt—which only a few months back trended toward the Muslim Brotherhood—although the size of the petition and the corresponding demonstrations give an idea of the groundswell across the country.

Some Westerners worry about lack of power-changing political mechanisms in such backward places as Egypt. The worrywarts are deluding themselves that the stagnant politics of the Euro, Anglo-American hemispheres and their protectorates provide these mechanisms.

Delusions of democracy …

When “Vlaamse Blok” (Flamish block), Belgium’s largest party, became too much of a threat to the powers that be in that country, the Belgium Supreme Court declared Belgium’s largest party (“Vlaamse Blok”) a “criminal organization” and ordered its dissolution.”

Lawmaker Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, has been similarly assailed in The Netherlands, except that he and The Demos stand up to and outfox The Establishment that wishes to bring them into compliance.

An entire book was written about what mobocracy has wrought on the minority of South Africa, now that a dominant-party state has been blessed as free and democratic by the West.

A point made in said book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, is that South Africa’s authentically liberal party in all its permutations has always been more classical liberal than left-liberal. Thus the Democratic Alliance’s Helen Zille is never as contemptible as a left-liberal American Democrat. We won’t insult the woman! I’d sum-up Zille with these words: She tries her best with the few powers she has retained. These powers have been subsumed in the national government, which will always and forever be a social-democratic black affair that represents the needs of tax consumers.

Ultimately, there is not much Zille can do for the whites (and colored) who vote for her, and who pay the lion’s share of the country’s taxes. There is near no devolution of powers to South Africa’s provinces. “The province’s powers are shared with the national government.” Like in the US. We still whimper about states’ rights but we’ve lost these as well as many of our individual liberties.

The tiny racial minority that constitutes the tax base of South Africa has no representation in a country that votes strictly along racial lines, and in which there is no veto power or meaningful devolution of powers to the provinces in which the assailed minority might prevail politically. The aforementioned book points out that the great Zulu chief Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi was one of the good guys of South Africa; the Mandela’s mafia—the ANC—is the bad element. Buthelezi, being a free market man, fought for the devolution of power rather than its concentration in a dominant-party state (the endgame of the ANC and its Anglo-American buddies). He was tarred as the bad guy by the same axis of evil, with the New York Times in the lead.

In any case, we should not look down on the Egyptians from the dizzying heights of our despotic democracies. Can we in the US dethrone our emperor du jour? Not really. Not with any meaningful consequences. Impeachment mechanisms don’t work, and neither do “democratic” elections, because the Democratic and Republican parties have each operated as counterweights in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one entity to the other. As my fellow libertarian Vox Day once observed, no sooner do the Republicans come to power, than they move to the left. When they get their turn, Democrats shuffle to the right. At some point, the zombie John McCain reaches across the aisle and the creeps converge.

“Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn almost got it right when he said, ‘Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.’ Correction: All that can be achieved with only 51 percent of the vote, making the slogan ‘freedom begins at the ballot box’ a very cruel hoax indeed.

At least the Egyptians have stumbled upon an effective way to make their sons of 60 dogs (an Egyptian expression for politicians) tremble in their palaces. Game. Set. Match, Egyptian people.

UPDATED: Morsi, The Military: Egypt Is A Hot Mess (The Size of Discontent)

Democracy, Elections, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Islam, Middle East

There are perhaps two not entirely unhappy conclusions to take away from the events underway in Cairo, Egypt. This week’s WND column, “Independence And The Declaration of Secession,” lamented that America has become a nation “of deracinated, fragmented and demoralized people, managed to their detriment by a despotic State.” (Updated here.)

The Egyptians, on the other hand, still have a redeeming quality, and it is a profound contempt for power. “Son of 60 dogs” is an Egyptian expression for a political master. This quality should serve them well.

The other thing I took away from listening to the more enlightened Egyptians of Tahrir Square is that many want what Americans once had thanks to their founders. Modern secular Egyptians are articulating a wish for a republic that safeguards minority rights, and not for a raw democracy in which those rights are subject to the whims and wishes of the majority, and where few are the issues that are not adjudicated by a national majority.

Moreover, while Americans have a hard time understanding the difference between a democracy and a republic, I get the impression that some Egyptians are hip to these distinctions.

Those who’ve been misled into believing that Morsi is not democratically legit, for what that’s worth, ought to be reminded that the Democratic Alliance for Egypt, “a coalition of political parties,” the largest party of which was the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party,” won the 2011-2012 election with 37.5% of the vote.

The runner-up was the Islamist Bloc, the “second largest political bloc in the parliament.” It was even more devout than The Brotherhood. It won 27.8% of the vote.

The nature of democracy and humanity is such that it is quite possible that their former supporters no longer back these parties. These supporters have realized, as Benjamin Barber put it, that “politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians”:

It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends.

Economic Policy Journal (EPJ) quotes Ron Paul’s on the Egyptian mess:

“A military coup in Egypt yesterday resulted in the removal and imprisonment of the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a closure of media outlets sympathetic to him, the house arrest of his advisors, and the suspension of the constitution. The military that overthrew Morsi is the main recipient of the $1.3 billion yearly US aid package to Egypt. You could say that the US ‘owns’ the Egyptian military that just overthrew its democratically-elected leader. The hypocrisy of the US administration on these events in Egypt is stunning …”

“Let’s review US policy toward Egypt to see the foolish hypocrisy of the government’s interventionism,” write Paul:

“First the US props up the unelected Hosni Mubarak for decades, spending tens of billions of dollars to keep him in power. Then the US provides assistance to those who in 2011 successfully overthrew Mubarak. Then the US demands an election. The Egyptians held an election that was deemed free and fair and shortly afterward the US-funded military overthrows the elected president. Then the US government warns the military that it needs to restore democracy – the very democracy that was destroyed by military coup! All the while the US government will not allow itself to utter the word “coup” when discussing what happened in Egypt yesterday because it would mean they might have to stop sending all those billions of dollars to Egypt. ”

UPDATE (7/8): We now have some idea of the size of Egyptian discontent: “22 million …—a large number considering Egypt’s estimated population of 93 million people.” We got those numbers from revelation of a “signature-gathering campaign called ‘Tamarod’ or ‘Rebel.'”

I will write more, however, on western delusions of representation (my book already does this http://www.ilanamercer.com/newsite/into-the-cannibals-pot.php) in a future post. Suffice it to say that the Egyptians have a better idea than we in the West of how to remove their rulers. Game. Set. Match, Egyptian people.

Democracy And The Immigration Political Steamroller

Constitution, Democracy, Elections, Federalism, Government, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, States' Rights

The essence of democracy is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” a “national purpose” that must be implemented by an all-powerful state. “Democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government,” writes legal scholar (and friend) James Ostrowski. “The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.”

James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a “small spot” (like Athens). Madison and the other founders attempted to forestall democracy by devising a republic, the hallmark of which was the preservation of individual liberty. To that end, they restricted the federal government to a handful of enumerated powers.

Decentralization, devolution of authority, and the restrictions on government imposed by a Bill of Rights were to ensure that few issues were left to the adjudication of a national majority.

When you consider every bit of legislation written by our democratically elected despotic lawmakers—the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744),” for example—contemplate the words of Benjamin Barber:

It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.

And where, pray tell, in the immigration tyranny is the Tenth-Amendment Center? Its scholars used to advocate for the right of the residents of the states to determine how they lived their lives. Unless I am doing him a disservice—in which case I apologize profusely—the last time Michael Boldin applied the Tenth Amendment creatively to the political steamroller that is immigration was when he distinguished between immigration and naturalization in 18th century nomenclature, back in … April 28, 2010.

Has the Tenth Amendment Center fallen to the Beltway bigwigs of the Cato Institute?

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UPDATE II: The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector

Constitution, Crime, Debt, Democracy, Government, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property, Taxation, The State

“The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“By now, Americans with a modicum of cerebral alacrity have a sense of the attitude among Washington State Democrats toward the immutable right of the people to keep their earnings. You all witnessed the despicable Jim McDermott’s intimidating verbal assaults, leveled at conservative property owners, during the House committee hearing on the den of iniquity and vice that is the Internal Revenue Service. For what is the seeking of ‘tax-exempt status’ if not a plea, directed at our overlords who art in D.C., to keep more of what is rightfully ours?

What Edmund Burke said about the House of Commons in his day applies in spades to a House packed with the likes of Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash. ‘Designed as a control for the people,’ the House has become a control ‘upon the people.’

And the trend extends to local governments, gone from which are the old-fashioned county governors, once devoted to low taxes and careful spending.

Here goes.

While trying to be neighborly, I made the mistake of being less than reverential about my property taxes in ‘The Evergreen State,’ and in particular, the 51.4 percent appropriated for ‘State and Local Schools.’

I was informed in high decibels that my husband and I, hardworking both, ought to thank our lucky stars for this valuable index—thousands paid per year toward ‘State and Local Schools’—for without it we’d be clueless about … the value of our home. (If anything, taxes distort market prices. But more about the curious fallacy of the benevolent property tax, as a price signal in the housing market, in a follow-up column.)

Yes, siree. The bad tempered diatribe then swerved to the plight of local law enforcement, who, my interlocutor alleged, were powerless to police a squatter camp in the North Bend vicinity, for lack of resources. Some believe that twice did a man from this homeless encampment invade a homestead in the community.

We fork over thousands in property taxes per annum, yet, as was being asserted, the police were without the necessary funds to fulfill the State’s only constitutional duty: protecting the people. Naturally, where the State fails to carry out its sacred duty, as is almost always the case, The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution instantiates the individual’s natural right to do exactly what the heroic homeowners did to safeguard life and property: hastened the intruder’s descent into hell.

Commensurate with the value this Washington-State locality places on limited authority and republican virtues—none at all—law enforcement is not even itemized in the property-tax bill issued.

The truth is that the lion’s share of our property taxes goes toward …

Read the complete column. “The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is now on WND.

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UPDATE I: The “wasteful monstrosity” discussed above was celebrated by the local newspaper’s intrepid reporters. It too is local in name only—for most “local newspapers” are corporately owned. In our case, the pabulum published weekly is by permission of The Seattle Times Co. When our local rag is not reporting on a theatre that will close, a cinema that is hiring, or a pizza place that’ll host “Raise the Dough for Seattle Children’s”—the newspaper simply parrots the partyline on everything. I know, because I line my parrot’s cage with its pages.

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UPDATE II (7/24): For more of an idea of the all-pervasive profligacy of the oink sector in my state, check out the “Seattle Parasite-To-Resident Ratio.”