The ballot boxes are the coffins of freedom. We will not take part in the funeral of freedom.
– A text message circulating on Iranian mobile1 phones yesterday
1 = US: cell phone
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Samizdata quote of the dayFebruary 20th, 2004 |
 18 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Ya’ know, just ’cause we’re Yanks don’t mean we don’t know what a mobile phone is. 😉
But the message is correct, in Iran anyway. “Voting” in an election where all results are subject to the revision of an unelected body is not freedom.
As the New York Post said “You can’t have Democracy without elections, but apparently you can have elections without Democracy.”
I hate to have to be the one to break it to you, Brock, but voting — in any case — is not “freedom”, either.
The people in Iran who’re circulating that message have their fingers on something crucially important that hundreds of millions of westerners haven’t learned in centuries. It remains to be seen whether they can fully explicate it and draw the proper conclusions.
Given the worldwide drumbeat for democracy, I’m not going to hold my breath.
Well, somehow I think their odds are better for a decent representative democracy than for some anarcho-capitalist wonderland…Unless Somalia is still the prototype for the latter. That might be an option. 😛
hundreds of millions of westerners haven’t learned in centuries
Just a little hyperbolic, perhaps? It is hard to find anywhere where even a million people have had the vote for two centuries.
We live in a messy world with no perfect solutions. Liberalism and voting, per se, may not have any necessary relationship, but they have in recent history gone quite closely together. I don’t think this is entirely coincidental.
Voting has its uses. Though it may foster pork and popular delusions, if you can sling the bastards out it is also a constraint on government. The problem Iranians have is the same Western Europeans now have but seem less aware of: the real power is not controlled or constrained by elected representatives.
What’s a “mobile phone?”
And if they’re high tech why are we selling them to Iranians?
I thought American companies were not allowed to sell high tech equipment to certain countries. and that a few select countries like the Pakistanis, French, Russians, Chinese, and N. Koreans has been granted a monopoly by the U.N. to do that.
😛
Guy: “hyperbolic”? Not in the least.
Let me explain something to you: “hundreds of millions” of Americans, alone, have been born, lived their entire lives — the only lives they ever had, mind you — and gone to their graves, devoted to this rampant, rollicking, delusion of democracy. They did it because they had always been told that it was the way to make things better, and I’m here to tell you that not one minute of any of it has worked out. America has managed to vote itself into straits that would be utterly alien to preceding generations who knew what freedom was.
And I’ll tell you this, while I’m at it: no nation in history has ever voted its way out of these conditions, and this one won’t, either. Hell, man, half the people on the street now are abject ignoramuses and morons. That anyone could expect anything good to come from letting them vote when they can’t even think is the very height of applied insanity, but here we are, with it.
“Suppose they gave an election and nobody came?”
(shrug)
Don’t worry about it, and don’t think about it.
The Somalia jokes will get us through.
The image of ballot boxes as “coffins” brings to mind Lyndon Johnson’s Senate campaign, in which the old let’s-get-votes-from-the-dead trick was allegedly employed on LBJ’s behalf in Duval County.
If Iran were to emulate the Richard Daley or Tammany Hall poltical machines of America’s past, that would be an improvement over the current state of affairs.
Votes for the dead? Reminds me of something I read in Metro last week where some woman had registered her two cows and pet dog on the electoral roll. I wasn’t sure what was worse – that the government sent her animals registration forms or that she filled them in.
Advance apololgies for the following geekery…
Let me explain something to you: “hundreds of millions” of Americans, alone, have been born, lived their entire lives — the only lives they ever had, mind you — and gone to their graves, devoted to this rampant, rollicking, delusion of democracy.
That’s no doubt part of the official version of the American myth, and the picture that civics teachers are encouraged to present. However, if you think about the figures for a minute, you’ll realise even this is a bit OTT. There are currently just over a couple of hundred million US citizens. Not all are even registered to vote. Half of those aren’t sufficiently devoted to the idea to exercise their right. (I doubt, Perry, that many are principled abstainers.)
And the US population has increased very rapidly. In 1900 the US census reckoned 76 millions. I don’t have population structure to hand, so (lowside) guestimate a third of those as below 21, half as women (Wyoming is small enough to ignore), one tenth barred southern blacks. It is hard to reckon more than 22 million registered voters for 1900. The popular vote at the 1900 presidential election was just under 14 million. In 1824 (the earliest it was recorded) it was 365,833.
Since there were only 2.4 million deaths in the US in 2001 (Nchs), I’d give even money that 200 million Americans haven’t died in the entire history of the US. Not all would even have been aware of democracy.
Most other Western countries’ experiences with democracy have been smaller, shorter-lived experiments.
Billy –
You can vote for small gov’t and pure property rights, and you can vote for Communism (even in America). Democracy is agnostic as to economic platform. You can vote for anything.
That’s freedom.
Your problem is that you can’t get other people to agree with you, and therefore you think you aren’t free. Well, maybe you aren’t, not perfectly, but unless you emigrate to Mars and set up a shack on Olympus Mons, you’re never going to be. Democracy & open political debate is the best thing going, and it’s the best way to maximise freedom.
Brock
Brock: “Your problem is that you can’t get other people to agree with you, …”
No, sir: that is simply not true. You can say that that’s my problem all day long if you want to, but it won’t make it so.
My problem lies in the fact that everyone else believes that they are morally authorized to get together and determine the terms and conditions of my life. They do this through some ridiculous alchemy wherein what none of them could morally do on their own suddenly becomes morally acceptable when they gather together in order to do it.
I certainly wouldn’t do that to them, and I never have.
And I don’t have to “move to Mars” as a price of pointing out these facts. Don’t hand me that “love it or leave it” horseshit. I didn’t take it from Agnew, and I’m not going to take it from you.
You can vote for small gov’t and pure property rights, and you can vote for Communism (even in America). Democracy is agnostic as to economic platform. You can vote for anything.
That’s freedom.
Ridiculous. There’s nothing remotely having to do with “freedom” in having your neighbors being able to pull a lever to determine what rights you have. The ancient Greeks learned that 2,000 years ago rendering democracy obselete two millenia ago.
Democracy is inherently biased with anti-freedom incentives, as the Public Choice school points out. It is emphatically not agnostic wrt economic systems. Rather, democracy favors a creeping socialism more than any other economic system. Libertarians often think, “If only we could convince the socially liberal part of the Democratic Party and the fiscally conservative part of the Conservative Party to join together with Libertarians, we could vote ourselves to freedom.” It don’t work like that. The fact that pro-freedom parts of the libertarian philosophy are split among the two Parties in partnership with the pro-statist parts is not an accident. It is inherent in the economic incentive structure of mob rule.
The classical liberals had learned from the Greeks and knew democracy had nothing to do with “freedom” and the American Founders did their best to try to ward off its emergence. It’s too bad they failed.
The sooner liberty lovers get over their love affair with democracy, the sooner we can move on to other solutions. Politics is not the answer.
Mr. Wilde’s post is further butressed by the strainings of Jim Henley to find someone, anyone to pick to vote for as President.
That quote should be our slogan as libertarians. It ever so neatly encapsulates the divide between democracy and liberty.
Seeing as how govt. employees are nearly always going to vote for statist politicians, barring those direct beneficiaries of the State’s coercive tax power from voting would probably do more to remove some of the worst excesses of creeping bureaucratic socialism within the democracies than any other single change.
Otherwise you will universally obtain results that are not in the best interests of the public as a whole.
And it’s all shown once again to lie in the nominating more than the voting.
I suppose we can tell a technology has substantially matured when we reach the point that foreigners condescend to tell us poor American rubes the proper name of a technology we invented.
This from a ferener residing in Massachussets, no less. A libertarian. With tech knowledge and, one would think, a memory of the ancien regime of the mid-90’s when Americans were the only people with mobiles. Oy vey.
And if you’re somehow American, I just don’t want to know. I don’t want to know what happened to you.
Funny, I remember Brits having mobiles in the mid ’80’s.
We call ’em handphones here. 😛
The Wobbly Guy
You must be mistaken. Reliable sources have put the first computer in Britain on January 18th, 1994, when Bill Gates accidentily lost his laptop on a flyover to India. Tony Blair, immediately upon receiving some late night calls from Al Gore, hurriedly claimed he’d invented it. Surely cell phones came in after the microprocessor.
I was there in ’93. Didn’t see a one. Admittedly, they made up for lost time and every one has them now (he said sniffily), but that doesn’t stop y’all from being late-comers.
I admit that I never actually talked on one of your “existing mobile phones” when I was there recently. Knowing the Kingdom’s well deserved reputation for complete, bumbling incompetence, I’ve a sneeking suspicion all these phones are a put-on. Come on. Admit it. You’re all talking in seashells surrounded by plastic. I won’t tell.