The End is Not for a While
If I wanted to get a new Amendment put on the ballot for my home state of California Iâd need to collect over [585,000 signatures][1]. Theoretically I might be able to do so by organizing a massive army of volunteers around the state. But if I was a billionaire I wouldnât have to spend countless hours rallying hundreds or thousands of volunteers to my cause because I could just hire a bunch of professional [signature gatherers][2] (which is a perfectly legal and largely unregulated practice).
And thatâs just to get something on the ballot, it doesnât begin to address the difficulty of convincing voters that its in their best interest to take your side on that issue. Again, if one side has orders of magnitude more resources than the other to dedicate to this process then theyâll have a very distinct advantage.
Having ungodly amounts of money, influence and resources at your disposal isnât an absolute guarantee that your side will win, but it sure bends the odds in your favor.
[1]: http://ballotpedia.org/Signature_requirements_for_ballot_measures_in_California
[2]: Ballot initiative signature gatherer - Ballotpedia
3 Likes
At last, we agree!
Forgive me if Iâm not excited about the idea of a âdemocracyâ that plays with loaded dice. At the high-rollers table.
6 Likes
Money is social power, in a rationalized form. Democracy is about equally sharing power. The very fact that some people have significantly more money than others means that some people have significantly more social power than others. Itâs not that having lots of money allows you to subvert democracy, itâs that if anyone has lots more money than anyone else, that there isnât democracy to begin with.
3 Likes
Whatâs a ree and why did you eat it?
Democracy is the equal sharing of political power, not social power. Theyâre two different things.
And, anyway, if you follow your argument to its logical conclusion, that would mean democracy is impossible if everyone didnât have equal amounts of money, which would be communism.
They can be different things. In practice there is often a large overlap. For many purposes, polity and society can be synonymous
It could, but you are operating under some presuppositions here. Communism tends to have little to do with equalizing amounts of money. Such a system could use other means of distributing resources which arenât measured in money in the first place. And lastly, âthat would be communismâ sounds like applying this label amounts to some insightful observation when it doesnât describe anything specific.
3 Likes
An intrusive central government seizing the assets of an entire class of people and redistributing them to promote some perceived social virtue is not in any way democratic, and is, in fact, the hallmark of many communist governments.
Also, it doesnât usually stop at asset seizing.
No, they arenât. Itâs an artificial distinction.
Exactly.
1 Like
Most supposedly democratic, non-communist governments do the exact same thing. They just choose different people and/or assets. Any statist system tends to do this to some extent. Many people are not statists anyway.
Also, itâs a dead giveaway that communism itself is classless, so any government which deals in classes of people is communist in name only.
Your perspective here also presupposes that âassetsâ are even a real thing, which is unscientific. Things are things, people are people. People imagining that they have a certain relationship with things doesnât make it so. Itâs monkey business.
Can verify, have encountered people before. 30% or so of them will throw their own mothers to the sharks for the right price.
1 Like
âŠand weâve done it through legislation and a tax structure that is being systematically dismantled by and for the benefit of⊠rich people! Using their money to shape the narrative in the media!
See how that works?
5 Likes
You wind up taking it back away again and then being uncivil?
um, you rather did.
for instance, what would be the civil penalty for libel if itâs proven
that one of these wondrous examples of free speech cost someone the
presidency?
Hope you come back a little more collected.
2 Likes
Well, then youâre arguing for communism; youâre definitely not arguing for democracy.
Time and time again, communist governments have shown themselves to be deeply, utterly undemocratic.
No, they donât do âthe exact same thing.â Itâs a question of scale. Most countries donât seize all of the assets of an entire class of people to the extent it wipes them out as a cohort. Taxing personal incomes to pay for welfare is radically different from liquidating the kulaks.
Ah yes, the whole âreal communism has never been achievedâ argument. That doesnât change the fact that several governments killed millions and millions of people trying to achieve their perfect, classless society.
Your bank account isnât a real thing? Your house? Your car? Do you have jewelry? Art? These arenât real things?
That legislation and tax structure hasnât been around since the founding of the country. Depending on which specific set of policies you mean, theyâre probably 60 years old at most.
[citation needed]
I am sure the Native Americans will find that comforting. How about people in the drug trade? It is an honest business which is vigorously harassed, with asset stripping a legal reality. How about US asset stripping of other countries who they are âhelpingâ? Wasnât âdivestiture of strategic assetsâ in the State Department goals for involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? Donât US policies of destabilizing countries in Central America and other regions qualify, along with the accompanying doctrine that business interests = national interests? When they install puppet governments, they are going beyond stripping assets from a mere class of people, but stripping whole countries.
How do you determine it as âthe factâ that such governments were trying to achieve any such thing? Talk is cheap, we need to audit their actions. You appear to be suffering from the clichĂ© Western ideological âcommie blindersâ where people somehow find it convenient to take claims of totalitarian governments at face value for publicity/propaganda purposes, yet assume the usual hidden nation state motives when it comes to intelligence and governmental policies. Kind of like the example I mentioned above of people in Western media being decried as âcynicsâ for referring to US involvement in the Middle East as war for oil and imperialism - when this is exactly how the US governments own agenda described it. In any kind of government where people are expected/required to trust those who represent them, they are and will be taken for suckers. The professed ideologies behind such process are mostly interchangeable.
Here we go again. Did I say that I âhaveâ any of those things? And even if I did, does things being real mean that they are somehow really âmineâ? I do believe in tangible real-world objects, but think that property and territory are hokey ideas which Iâd rather avoid. And it so happens that I do a fairly thorough job of avoiding them in practice.
1 Like
What you describe are actions warring nations of all ideologies have taken throughout history (and, yes, are uniformly wrong). The difference is that the communist governments import these actions back to the home front.
Your point about American Indians is well taken, but thatâs an outlier compared to the scale, frequency, and thoroughness with which it occurs under communist governments.
Iâm with you on the drugs, though. Theyâre products that were arbitrarily outlawed and should be legalized immediately, en masse.
The same way we determine any historical fact: scrupulous research.
Though if you have an alternate theory regarding the reasons behind the Cambodian killing fields or Soviet dekulakization, Iâm all ears.
You are far too intelligent to think my rhetorical use of âyouâ meant that you have those specific items. Câmon.
If you think of property as a âhokey idea,â youâre rejecting a cornerstone of the Enlightenment and, arguably, of all individual rights.
One of your links is broken there⊠
Edited to remove no-longer-useful parts.
