4 ms·

Constitutional Republic yes, Democracy no. Democracy isn't desirable. Mob rule is a terrible system of government. Democracy != voting; Democracy != freedom.

by shingen 15y ago

Constitutional Republic yes, Democracy no. Democracy isn't desirable. Mob rule is a terrible system of government. Democracy != voting; Democracy != freedom. America and many other systems have long since proven that freedom through constitutional protections with representative government does flourish. Those systems specifically flourish by protecting the weak from the powerful, the minority from the majority. The 'people aren't smart enough' is a fascist, asinine argument. The only time I see that used, is when someone has a complex to dominate others.

3pt14159 15y ago
What about Peter Thiel wanting to make a sea-based libertarian country that doesn't have a democracy because people arn't smart enough to keep it libertarian? (Granted, they could leave by relocating somewhere else, but that is true of most countries anyways.)
- shingen 15y ago
  Anytime someone lays out an argument by stating that some other group of people isn't intelligent enough to self govern, you should be suspicious of the character and intentions of the person making that argument. Whether that applies to Thiel or not I have no clue, I haven't seen all his statement on the libertarian colony proposal (I've just seen brief discussions on it).
  - dantheman 15y ago
    If, the 3pt14159 was referring to seasteading http://www.seasteading.org http://www.seasteading.org Then the entire purpose is to try and live in the absence of government through voluntary cooperation and nonaggression. It's unfortunate that an experiment like this cannot take place on land - no government will ever voluntarily cede control of land & people that it does not own. In general the theory is that current government functions can be better handled by the market. That is, police and justice can be better served when they are enforced through voluntary contracts. For instance, the war on drugs, abusive police, the TSA, and all sorts of other detrimental policies will be more difficult to maintain when the people are your customers.
    - toyg 15y ago
      In reality, "a customer" is whoever pays the most money for something you are selling. In the modern world, this would be corporations and rich individuals, not "the people". The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.
      - pdonis 15y ago
        > In reality, "a customer" is whoever pays the most money for something you are selling. In the modern world, this would be corporations and rich individuals, not "the people". If this were true, corporations and rich individuals would own everything. They don't. Also, if it were true, nobody but corporations and rich individuals would be able to buy anything. Are you having trouble buying groceries because corporations and rich individuals have snapped them all up? The correct definition of "customer" is "anyone who pays any price for what you are selling, that you are willing to sell it for". As long as the item is worth less to you and more to the customer than a price you can both agree on, the transaction is a mutual gain for both of you. In a true free market, if there are no such customers--because what you're selling isn't worth enough to any of them to pay a price you are willing to accept--then you go out of business. Since in such a market you can't force anyone to buy your product--they only will if it's worth more to them than what they pay--you can only stay in business by providing mutual gain. That principle would apply just as well to services like law enforcement, if they were provided in a true free market.
        toyg 15y ago
        > If this were true, corporations and rich individuals would own everything. They don't. Uh, there is very little they don't own or control, to be honest. Even if they didn't, assuming the current trend of privatizing even the most essential services continues, it will be the case in just a couple of decades. > Are you having trouble buying groceries because corporations and rich individuals have snapped them all up? Am I having trouble buying some groceries, because rich people have pushed prices so high, or in some cases because corporations buy all of them in order to resell them in a different, more expensive form? Why, yes. But I digress. > In a true free market, if there are no such customers--because what you're selling isn't worth enough to any of them to pay a price you are willing to accept--then you go out of business. Do you seriously think a service like TSA is not useful to any corporation? Like franchise shops in airport lounges selling bottles of water at three times the market price... Also, your reasoning completely ignores forces, like advertising, which are used to create artificial demand. They would still exist in a free market, probably even more so (because competition would be even harder). > That principle would apply just as well to services like law enforcement, if they were provided in a true free market. Rich people would enjoy premium protection at premium prices, and poor people would receive little or no protection because they cannot afford more. Wouldn't that be fun, eh? Reminds me of the US healthcare market, that other miracle of the Free Market.
- sidww2 15y ago
  Not true. Immigration laws are a huge barrier, an insurmountable one for some.
- jpadkins 15y ago
  the seasteading institute is not only for libertarian countries. The point is to enable experimentation and competition in governments. One group of seasteadders can create a commune, one a voluntary society, one can create a dictatorship...
  - WiseWeasel 15y ago
    Come visit Weaselia for the climate, stay because we didn't say you could leave[1]. [1]Weaselia is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Weasel Brand sweatshops.
javert 15y ago
I came here to say almost precisely this. However, I do think it's true that people aren't smart enough for democracy, and that's a part of why we need a constitutional republic instead. Is there something wrong with that line of argumentation?
- Shivetya 15y ago
  Its not that they are too smart or not, it is that far too many are too greedy or too lazy.
  - javert 15y ago
    In a system where people are protected from one other by individual rights, someone being too lazy or too greedy (if that is even possible) can only hurt themself. How can your laziness or greed affect me?
- shingen 15y ago
  Here's what's logically wrong with that line of argument: Smart / dumb are relative scales, so there will always be smarter, and dumber, no matter what you do. If you filled a society with what we currently define as genius level intellects, there would be the equivalent to dumb people amongst them - the dumb people would have 145 IQ's and the smart people would have 180 IQ's --- you get the idea. Majority rules will always allow one group to optionally eat the other, and violate the rights of the minority. Whether that minority is the dumber 49% or the smarter 49%, either scenario is equally morally reprehensible. Peikoff would say: think in extrapolated principles. Look up the first serious conversations Peikoff had with Rand (she couldn't get him to think in principles). Whether you're dealing with smart people with 250 IQ's, and 'dumb' people with 160 IQ's, the smart people might decide they know what's best for the 'dumb' people (and proceed to violate their liberty). The principle remains whether you're dealing with 70 IQ's and 160 IQ's or much higher scales of intellect.
  - javert 15y ago
    Do we know each other? :-) I'm going to just take for granted in this response the common ground we obviously have. FYI, I definitely think "people are not smart enough for democracy" is the wrong way to make the argument, because it misses the point; democracy is not the ideal to be striving for. But I'm not sure that it's wrong per se. I usually take "dumb" and "smart" to really mean "ignorant" and "not ignorant" in a certain context. (Mabye I should not take them to mean that, but anyway.) So, a democracy of people who were truly not ignorant about principles of government--i.e., they fully support individual rights--would work fine. Conversely, the reason democracy does not work is because people in general are ignorant of the proper principles of government and would trample individual rights. I guess there is a key difference between the purpose of the government and the mechanism. Democracy can be thought of as either. In the former case, it's clearly wrong. In the latter case, it's just dangerous and suboptimal.
batista 15y ago
Democracy isn't desirable. Mob rule is a terrible system of government. Democracy != voting; Democracy != freedom. Really? And who said democracy == mob rule? Mob is a weasel term, to imply "people when take decisions as a group are inherently bad". Well, people taking decisions as a whole has been quite nice when it happened and while it lasted (or was allowed to last). I'm thinking the Athenian Democracy, various communes, etc. And it's not like any other system of government is better. Besides true democracy, everything else is tyranny, including representational democracy. Democracy means "the people should be governed exactly how the majority of them likes to". No bait and switch representation, no BS.
- dataferret 15y ago
  Athenian democracy was subject to bouts of mob rule - note the treasurer incidents. Courts were barbaric, and really amounted to popularity votes as jurors had little legal oversight. At the assembly level, for their credit, the criteria for citizenship required military training and voting for war generally meant you had to actually do the fighting - hence the level of peace. Mobs form when there is no responsibility for their vote or actions. That's why in unrestrained democracies, the mob majority can disenfranchise the minority so easily and quickly.
- toyg 15y ago
  Careful: democracy is not about majority, but rather (literally) "government by the people"; there is quite a difference. There are various types of "majority", and all of them fail at fully representing "the people" as a whole, unless it's a 100% majority where nobody abstains (and even then, one would have to argue about who was allowed to vote and how). This is why any robust democratic system will have, on some subjects, "qualified" majorities (where the threshold is set much higher than 51%, or abstained votes are counted against, etc etc) or "relative" majorities (where the most popular option wins, even when it doesn't represent at least 50% of the votes) as well as the "simple" majority (usually 50% + 1 or 51% of the expressed votes). They're different ways of really interpreting "the will of the people" on different subjects. A proper democratic system recognises the importance of respecting minorities and the volatility (and gullibility) of popular sentiment, and safeguards itself against wrong decisions. Many fascist governments were democratically elected and survived re-election, but they were not democratic in nature. If the majority of synapses in your brain should decide tomorrow that shooting yourself in the foot is a good idea, despite "a small but vocal minority opposed to the plan" (i.e. your foot), that doesn't mean that it'd be in your real interest to do so.
kiba 15y ago
The 'people aren't smart enough' is a fascist, asinine argument. People are plenty smart, it's just that democracy encourage the worst kind of decision making. The only time I see that used, is when someone has a complex to dominate others.* I prefer that you answer with substance, not accusation of having a domination complex.
derleth 15y ago
Constitutional Republic yes This is a form of Democracy.

by shingen 15y ago

3pt14159 15y ago

What about Peter Thiel wanting to make a sea-based libertarian country that doesn't have a democracy because people arn't smart enough to keep it libertarian? (Granted, they could leave by relocating somewhere else, but that is true of most countries anyways.)

shingen 15y ago
Anytime someone lays out an argument by stating that some other group of people isn't intelligent enough to self govern, you should be suspicious of the character and intentions of the person making that argument. Whether that applies to Thiel or not I have no clue, I haven't seen all his statement on the libertarian colony proposal (I've just seen brief discussions on it).
- dantheman 15y ago
  If, the 3pt14159 was referring to seasteading http://www.seasteading.org http://www.seasteading.org Then the entire purpose is to try and live in the absence of government through voluntary cooperation and nonaggression. It's unfortunate that an experiment like this cannot take place on land - no government will ever voluntarily cede control of land & people that it does not own. In general the theory is that current government functions can be better handled by the market. That is, police and justice can be better served when they are enforced through voluntary contracts. For instance, the war on drugs, abusive police, the TSA, and all sorts of other detrimental policies will be more difficult to maintain when the people are your customers.
  - toyg 15y ago
    In reality, "a customer" is whoever pays the most money for something you are selling. In the modern world, this would be corporations and rich individuals, not "the people". The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.
    - pdonis 15y ago
      > In reality, "a customer" is whoever pays the most money for something you are selling. In the modern world, this would be corporations and rich individuals, not "the people". If this were true, corporations and rich individuals would own everything. They don't. Also, if it were true, nobody but corporations and rich individuals would be able to buy anything. Are you having trouble buying groceries because corporations and rich individuals have snapped them all up? The correct definition of "customer" is "anyone who pays any price for what you are selling, that you are willing to sell it for". As long as the item is worth less to you and more to the customer than a price you can both agree on, the transaction is a mutual gain for both of you. In a true free market, if there are no such customers--because what you're selling isn't worth enough to any of them to pay a price you are willing to accept--then you go out of business. Since in such a market you can't force anyone to buy your product--they only will if it's worth more to them than what they pay--you can only stay in business by providing mutual gain. That principle would apply just as well to services like law enforcement, if they were provided in a true free market.
      - toyg 15y ago
        > If this were true, corporations and rich individuals would own everything. They don't. Uh, there is very little they don't own or control, to be honest. Even if they didn't, assuming the current trend of privatizing even the most essential services continues, it will be the case in just a couple of decades. > Are you having trouble buying groceries because corporations and rich individuals have snapped them all up? Am I having trouble buying some groceries, because rich people have pushed prices so high, or in some cases because corporations buy all of them in order to resell them in a different, more expensive form? Why, yes. But I digress. > In a true free market, if there are no such customers--because what you're selling isn't worth enough to any of them to pay a price you are willing to accept--then you go out of business. Do you seriously think a service like TSA is not useful to any corporation? Like franchise shops in airport lounges selling bottles of water at three times the market price... Also, your reasoning completely ignores forces, like advertising, which are used to create artificial demand. They would still exist in a free market, probably even more so (because competition would be even harder). > That principle would apply just as well to services like law enforcement, if they were provided in a true free market. Rich people would enjoy premium protection at premium prices, and poor people would receive little or no protection because they cannot afford more. Wouldn't that be fun, eh? Reminds me of the US healthcare market, that other miracle of the Free Market.
sidww2 15y ago
Not true. Immigration laws are a huge barrier, an insurmountable one for some.
jpadkins 15y ago
the seasteading institute is not only for libertarian countries. The point is to enable experimentation and competition in governments. One group of seasteadders can create a commune, one a voluntary society, one can create a dictatorship...
- WiseWeasel 15y ago
  Come visit Weaselia for the climate, stay because we didn't say you could leave[1]. [1]Weaselia is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Weasel Brand sweatshops.

javert 15y ago

I came here to say almost precisely this. However, I do think it's true that people aren't smart enough for democracy, and that's a part of why we need a constitutional republic instead. Is there something wrong with that line of argumentation?

Shivetya 15y ago
Its not that they are too smart or not, it is that far too many are too greedy or too lazy.
- javert 15y ago
  In a system where people are protected from one other by individual rights, someone being too lazy or too greedy (if that is even possible) can only hurt themself. How can your laziness or greed affect me?
shingen 15y ago
Here's what's logically wrong with that line of argument: Smart / dumb are relative scales, so there will always be smarter, and dumber, no matter what you do. If you filled a society with what we currently define as genius level intellects, there would be the equivalent to dumb people amongst them - the dumb people would have 145 IQ's and the smart people would have 180 IQ's --- you get the idea. Majority rules will always allow one group to optionally eat the other, and violate the rights of the minority. Whether that minority is the dumber 49% or the smarter 49%, either scenario is equally morally reprehensible. Peikoff would say: think in extrapolated principles. Look up the first serious conversations Peikoff had with Rand (she couldn't get him to think in principles). Whether you're dealing with smart people with 250 IQ's, and 'dumb' people with 160 IQ's, the smart people might decide they know what's best for the 'dumb' people (and proceed to violate their liberty). The principle remains whether you're dealing with 70 IQ's and 160 IQ's or much higher scales of intellect.
- javert 15y ago
  Do we know each other? :-) I'm going to just take for granted in this response the common ground we obviously have. FYI, I definitely think "people are not smart enough for democracy" is the wrong way to make the argument, because it misses the point; democracy is not the ideal to be striving for. But I'm not sure that it's wrong per se. I usually take "dumb" and "smart" to really mean "ignorant" and "not ignorant" in a certain context. (Mabye I should not take them to mean that, but anyway.) So, a democracy of people who were truly not ignorant about principles of government--i.e., they fully support individual rights--would work fine. Conversely, the reason democracy does not work is because people in general are ignorant of the proper principles of government and would trample individual rights. I guess there is a key difference between the purpose of the government and the mechanism. Democracy can be thought of as either. In the former case, it's clearly wrong. In the latter case, it's just dangerous and suboptimal.

batista 15y ago

Democracy isn't desirable. Mob rule is a terrible system of government. Democracy != voting; Democracy != freedom. Really? And who said democracy == mob rule? Mob is a weasel term, to imply "people when take decisions as a group are inherently bad". Well, people taking decisions as a whole has been quite nice when it happened and while it lasted (or was allowed to last). I'm thinking the Athenian Democracy, various communes, etc. And it's not like any other system of government is better. Besides true democracy, everything else is tyranny, including representational democracy. Democracy means "the people should be governed exactly how the majority of them likes to". No bait and switch representation, no BS.

dataferret 15y ago
Athenian democracy was subject to bouts of mob rule - note the treasurer incidents. Courts were barbaric, and really amounted to popularity votes as jurors had little legal oversight. At the assembly level, for their credit, the criteria for citizenship required military training and voting for war generally meant you had to actually do the fighting - hence the level of peace. Mobs form when there is no responsibility for their vote or actions. That's why in unrestrained democracies, the mob majority can disenfranchise the minority so easily and quickly.
toyg 15y ago
Careful: democracy is not about majority, but rather (literally) "government by the people"; there is quite a difference. There are various types of "majority", and all of them fail at fully representing "the people" as a whole, unless it's a 100% majority where nobody abstains (and even then, one would have to argue about who was allowed to vote and how). This is why any robust democratic system will have, on some subjects, "qualified" majorities (where the threshold is set much higher than 51%, or abstained votes are counted against, etc etc) or "relative" majorities (where the most popular option wins, even when it doesn't represent at least 50% of the votes) as well as the "simple" majority (usually 50% + 1 or 51% of the expressed votes). They're different ways of really interpreting "the will of the people" on different subjects. A proper democratic system recognises the importance of respecting minorities and the volatility (and gullibility) of popular sentiment, and safeguards itself against wrong decisions. Many fascist governments were democratically elected and survived re-election, but they were not democratic in nature. If the majority of synapses in your brain should decide tomorrow that shooting yourself in the foot is a good idea, despite "a small but vocal minority opposed to the plan" (i.e. your foot), that doesn't mean that it'd be in your real interest to do so.

kiba 15y ago

The 'people aren't smart enough' is a fascist, asinine argument. People are plenty smart, it's just that democracy encourage the worst kind of decision making. The only time I see that used, is when someone has a complex to dominate others.* I prefer that you answer with substance, not accusation of having a domination complex.

derleth 15y ago

Constitutional Republic yes This is a form of Democracy.