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Sir Winston Churchill's famous line was "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", and he was right, because a 'dictatorship of the majority' is better than a 'dictatorship of a minority'. But perhaps we should be trying the 'dictatorship-free' form of government. This is what free trade would deliver. The prosperity and innovation in western democracies is not the result of democracy at all, but rather the relatively high tolerance by these democracies of free markets, and the constitutional limits to 'dictatorship of the majority'. It is still very much in the interests of the ruling classes to believe that they are ruling by divine right. But let's keep in mind that laws are enforced at the point of police guns. Democracy is anything but a fairy tale world of nice guys.
And it gets worse. The other leap of faith that democrats would have us make - REPRESENTATIVE democracy! Instead of voting on issues directly, we vote for someone who convinces us that he might vote for some of the things we would vote for, were we to have the right to vote on them directly. Whoa! This sounds bad because it is bad.
That's why the US Bill of Rights in 1791 was wisely and specifically designed to prevent representative democracy from stripping the people's right to free speech and their right to bear arms. This was a way to try to control the power of the "majority". If only the constitution had guaranteed free trade! |
