We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
«  
  »

Samizdata quote of the day

· Slogans & Quotations

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

– H.L. Mencken.

October 5th, 2006 |

9 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • mandrill
    October 6, 2006 at 9:34 am

    My experience tells me that the common people are told what they want and are quite happy to take it good and hard.

  • Brad
    October 6, 2006 at 4:19 pm

    ***My experience tells me that the common people are told what they want and are quite happy to take it good and hard.***

    Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. It that’s the case, what he was offering was heroin versus opium.

    It seems that the large part of the bell curve of individuals want the security blanket of State/Religion for comfort.

    The twist in the whole thing is that they want it good and hard for everyone else and believe that they’ll be able to beat the system. They want order maintained by force for everyone else while they pursue as much liberty as possible for themselves. The Libertarian’s dillema is to try and convince people that draconian codes don’t really make them safer, by and large, and to properly define their fears and angst and accept the vagaries of life. Try and convince them not fall for the fearmongering put forth by political “pushers” all the while trying not to sound above it all, which I deem is the biggest problem in communicating libertarian messages. Junkies don’t want to be prostlytized to.

    Personally I find this quote a bit better:

    Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

    Perhaps the difference between a libertarian and a statist is the libertarians are tempted and statists are more than tempted.

  • triticale
    October 6, 2006 at 6:07 pm

    Well, I’ll admit to being tempted to spit on my hands…

  • Edward Lud
    October 6, 2006 at 6:40 pm

    I am increasingly convinced by the view that democracy is inherently geared in favour of statism and collectivism.

    Not an attractive conclusion to reach, of course, but my plans for global domination are at least still in their infancy.

  • Nigel Sedgwick
    October 6, 2006 at 8:07 pm

    Brad wrote:

    Personally I find this quote a bit better:

    Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.

    Perhaps the difference between a libertarian and a statist is the libertarians are tempted and statists are more than tempted.

    Perhaps it is also that statists give themselves force of law for their murderous and other actions, whereas mere libertarians have both human feeling and legal deterrent as constraints.

    Best regards

  • mandrill
    October 6, 2006 at 8:11 pm

    Edward, of course it is, the tyranny of the majority is one of the most insidious and deceptive assaults on individualism. You can vote however you like as long as you go along with the result, woe betide you if you don’t.
    By the simple act of voting you are giving tacit approval to the way things are and acceptance of another’s domination over you.
    What if they called an election and nobody voted?

  • Edward Lud
    October 6, 2006 at 9:48 pm

    Mandrill – what if they called an election and nobody voted?

    Well quite. But then ‘THEY’ probably introduce an Australian-style law to make voting compulsory.

    But the tyranny of the majority was not really what I was getting at.

    I have in mind more that quote from Alexander Tytler which PJ O’Rourke cites in Parliament of Whores, to the effect that democracy can survive only as long as it takes people to work out that said mechanism enables them to vote themselves large wodges of other’s cash.

    Of course that is a tyranny of the majority, but more than that it’s the sheer structural bias of democracy in favour of buying votes and creating client classes that concerns me.

    Yet at the same time, I’m all in favour of ‘trusting the people’ – but as individuals to govern their own lives, rather than those of others.

  • Nick M
    October 7, 2006 at 1:31 pm

    Quite often democracy ina tyranny of a minority.

    Tony Blair’s Labour didn’t receive a majority of botes cast – much less the votes of a majority of the actual electorate.

    Remember the French placards urging to vote for the “crook not the facist”?

    And all those strange coalitions that spring-up after the count – organised in smoke filled rooms? How many voters would have asked for that exact government if they’d had the on the ballot sheet?

  • Paul Marks
    October 9, 2006 at 9:14 pm

    Democracy will “work” (i.e. not lead to ever greater government spending and regulations) as long as most people EITHER are moral enough to reject arguments such as “the rich will pay” or “only big business will lose” (by saying “I refuse to benefit at the expense of those richer than myself”), or have the knowledge to see through these “arguments” (i.e. understand that a Welfare State can not really be paid for by “the rich” or that regulations hurt everyone in the end).

    Sometimes there is a clear date when a people fail the test of democracy. In the Unted States that date was 70 years ago – the election of 1936.

    President Roosevelt (without warning people in his 1932 campaign) had urinated all over the Constitution of the United States. He had taken privately owned gold by the threat of violence, he had voided private contracts, he had imposed unconstitutional regulations and created unconstitutional spending schemes.

    The Supreme Court had overturned some, but not all, of his crimes – but citizens with any regard for limited government would still have turned him out of office (even though his Republican opponent was the moderate Alfred Landon who might well have only got rid of a few of his regulations and schemes).

    The people reelected Franklin Roosevelt by 60% to 40% (only a majority of voters of Maine and Vermont stood by the Constitution of the United States). At this point democracy and a constitutional Republic divided.

    Not just because of some evil plot by the elite (much though I might want to say that) but because most people failed.

    They did not have the knowledge to understand that Franklin Roosevelt’s antics were prolonging the Depression (not fighting it) and that government antics (the creidit money bubble and the panic response to the bust) had created the Depression in the first place.

    Nor did they have the morality to place limited government (or liberty in general) above their falsely calculated material interests (that their calculation was false is no problem for economic theory – as one vote, out of tens of millions, is not going to alter the result of an election no individual seems to have a rational reason to study matters in depth, this has unfortunate collective consequences).

    In short most people were both ignorant and bad. This is not antiAmerican point – I suspect that (even in 1936) a bigger margin of British people would have gone the wrong way.

    Certainly one can blame statist control of the “education system” and of the radio stations (private radio stations still broadcast slanted news and current affairs coverage, or they would have lost their licenses, and most private universities such as Columbia were as bad then as they are now) – but, in the end, the voters themselves must carry some of the blame.

    The American people had been given a Republic “if they could keep it” – and they had (by this time) proved no longer fit to keep it.

    Have people changed? Are most people better than their grandparents were in 1936? I doubt it (I suspect they are worse).

    Let us look (for example) at the votes in the various States on increasing minimum wage level regulations – the votes will be held on November 7th.

    Anyone who votes “yes” (to such a proposal) is both ignorant (in that they think that passing a regulation can improve wages and generally improve the lot of the poor) and bad (in that they are prepared to use the threat of violence to try and make an employer pay what he does not want to pay).

    Let us see if there is a single State in the Union where most voters are not both ignorant and bad.

    A “New York Times” journalist on B.B.C. Radio (“A point of view” broadcast on Friday and Sunday last) was gloating about how most people really followed his “class war, rich against poor” view of politics without even knowing it – and how they would show this with their votes on the minimum wage.

    He did not say “Darkness, my darkness – we have managed to corrupt them, due to their weakness” but he might as well have.

«  
  »