Not a democracy
Yesterday I discovered a terrific website courtesy of knightchik: Backwoods Home Magazine. Their tagline, "Practical ideas for self-reliant living," sums up the content well. Many of their articles are posted on their site. Today I'm going to peruse energy and self-reliance categories.
Yesterday I got sucked into a few of the commentary articles. They're unabashedly libertarian. Whether or not you subscribe to that point of view, I think they're informative, these two especially:
Losing our rights as we watch television
Why bureaucracy will likely destroy America
Below are some excerpts from the first article for anyone interested.
"Democracy doesn’t confer individual rights. It isn’t empowerment of the individual, it’s empowerment of the majority, and you are only empowered if the majority allows it.
"[O]ur own Founding Fathers saw the major defect of both the Athenian and Roman systems-that the individual was still at the mercy of the state. So, what they did was to create a Constitution, a set of principles that listed the powers of the state. Any powers not specifically given to the state-in this case, the federal government-were reserved to the people and the separate states that make up these United States. With the first 10 amendments, which were added shortly after the Constitution was ratified, they also guaranteed that we, as individuals, had certain rights which the government could not take away.
"It was the first and only time this has ever happened in history. The United States is a quirk in history. Never before, nor since, and perhaps never again will people have the rights Americans have."
“What do you mean, never again?” Bill asked. “You make it sound as if we’re losing our rights. What about the progress we’re making? We’re pushing for democracy all over the world.”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that democracy doesn’t mean rights and it especially doesn’t mean individual rights. The 'progress,' as you call it, is toward collective rights as seen by the majority, whoever’s in power, or even just some special interests. Our rights are separate from our democratic principles and they’re probably more important. I could live without democracy if I had certain rights guaranteed, but I couldn’t live with democracy and no rights.
“In virtually every other country that has even admitted that individuals have rights, it has always been at the pleasure of the state. Our Constitution, and only our Constitution, has the revolutionary idea that individuals-little guys, like us-have inalienable and natural rights.
“Read the press, listen to the neo-socialists, the religious right, the environmentalists, the media, and the humanitarians: to them individual rights exist only at the pleasure of society and must submit to some greater good which only they can define-which means our rights don’t exist at all because the state, the majority, or whatever it is we call society can change its mind-and often does.”
“So, it’s democratic in the sense that we vote; it’s republican, in the sense that we vote for representatives; and it’s constitutional in that there’s a set of rules,” Dave said.
“And some of those rules implicitly acknowledge the existence of a set of rights that the government may not infringe upon,” Mac added.
Yesterday I got sucked into a few of the commentary articles. They're unabashedly libertarian. Whether or not you subscribe to that point of view, I think they're informative, these two especially:
Losing our rights as we watch television
Why bureaucracy will likely destroy America
Below are some excerpts from the first article for anyone interested.
"Democracy doesn’t confer individual rights. It isn’t empowerment of the individual, it’s empowerment of the majority, and you are only empowered if the majority allows it.
"[O]ur own Founding Fathers saw the major defect of both the Athenian and Roman systems-that the individual was still at the mercy of the state. So, what they did was to create a Constitution, a set of principles that listed the powers of the state. Any powers not specifically given to the state-in this case, the federal government-were reserved to the people and the separate states that make up these United States. With the first 10 amendments, which were added shortly after the Constitution was ratified, they also guaranteed that we, as individuals, had certain rights which the government could not take away.
"It was the first and only time this has ever happened in history. The United States is a quirk in history. Never before, nor since, and perhaps never again will people have the rights Americans have."
“What do you mean, never again?” Bill asked. “You make it sound as if we’re losing our rights. What about the progress we’re making? We’re pushing for democracy all over the world.”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that democracy doesn’t mean rights and it especially doesn’t mean individual rights. The 'progress,' as you call it, is toward collective rights as seen by the majority, whoever’s in power, or even just some special interests. Our rights are separate from our democratic principles and they’re probably more important. I could live without democracy if I had certain rights guaranteed, but I couldn’t live with democracy and no rights.
“In virtually every other country that has even admitted that individuals have rights, it has always been at the pleasure of the state. Our Constitution, and only our Constitution, has the revolutionary idea that individuals-little guys, like us-have inalienable and natural rights.
“Read the press, listen to the neo-socialists, the religious right, the environmentalists, the media, and the humanitarians: to them individual rights exist only at the pleasure of society and must submit to some greater good which only they can define-which means our rights don’t exist at all because the state, the majority, or whatever it is we call society can change its mind-and often does.”
“So, it’s democratic in the sense that we vote; it’s republican, in the sense that we vote for representatives; and it’s constitutional in that there’s a set of rules,” Dave said.
“And some of those rules implicitly acknowledge the existence of a set of rights that the government may not infringe upon,” Mac added.