From: Randall Randall (wolfkin@freedomspace.net)
Date: Thu Aug 01 2002 - 05:02:13 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> Randall writes
> In other words, I'm saying that
> while a nation is democratic (in every historical example)
> it does not kill millions of its citizens.
This would appear to be true, if you stipulate that you are
not counting nations where the vote is fixed, or the citizens
are coerced into voting a certain way, or few inhabitants can
vote.
However, it also appears that democratic societies tend to
slide into being less free, and eventually non-demcratic.
>>You appear to be defining democratic societies as those in
>>which widespread institutional slaughter doesn't happen. By
>>that standard, I don't think the results are in yet on whether
>>the US will be thought to have been democratic by historians.
>
> No ;-) I wasn't *trying* to define democratic that way. How
> decidedly ungenerous of you to suggest so :-)
I'm a bad, bad man. :)
> Democratic societies are those which have for
> a considerable time embraced the democratic traditions of
> free elections, universal or not-so-universal suffrage, and
> are ruled by law (not to claim that, unfortunately, *everything*
> that happens is lawful, which even in the best democracies it's
> not). Without knowing the details of the history of the three
> African countries that you mention, I'll bet that you won't
> find any democratic institutions of long standing there, nor
> much at all in the way of basic freedoms. Freedom and democracy
> aren't identical, but they are linked.
If you changed your argument to refer to free societies rather than
democratic ones, we would be more often in agreement. :) However,
it's also true that free people tend to be more skeptical that laws
made by others are good for their own sake.
My own personal preference is for free-market laws, but I don't have
any certainty about exactly which laws would be enforced in a free
market (though I expect that they would tend toward libertarianism).
-- Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> "Congress keeps telling me I ain't causin' nuthin' but problems and now they're sayin' I'm in trouble with the government; I'm lovin' it" -- Eminem
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