Is 2 wolves and lamb voting on what they will have for dinner. I have no desire to be ruled by the majority. If we had a a straightforward democratic system we would have no free speech, no gun rights, no rights at all really. We would be like Canada or the EU, I have no desire for that dystopia ( and yes I did call the EU and Canada a dystopia for which I am sure many will disagree)
I abhor collectivism, and systems of government designed to promote majoritarianism over the minority... and the smallest minority is the individual
And yes, there must always be dinner. Ok, we aren't literally eating people in real politics, but still, winners and losers must be picked on occasion. This is simply because political resources are limited. Furthermore, the "2 wolves and lamb" situation is less common than you think. Literally speaking, one lamb cannot support that many wolves. Applied to human politics in the real world, 70% of the population can't benefit from harming the other 30% - there's not enough "meat" to go around. But 1% can benefit greatly from harming 99%. So in practice, democratic accountability puts bounds on how shitty governments can get.
Free speech is not a pesky barrier that democracy tries to get around. It is a peace treaty; an agreement by the government that it will not prosecute culture wars. Furthermore, said culture wars are usually pushed by extremely small minorities - i.e. one wolf splits the two hundred lamb votes in half so he can eat one or two of them in the ensuing chaos. That's how you usually get "two wolves and a lamb" rather than the opposite of "two lambs and a wolf", which is more common
And for the record: yes Canada and the EU have free speech. Maybe not as extremely guarded as America does, but it's still there.
I'm not going to get involved in the gun debate aside from pointing out that guns are not a backstop against abuses of government power. You have a pistol, they have nuclear weapons.
The only thing I can think of for why you'd argue that Canada or the EU are dystopias is that they have mildly more progressive governments and higher tax rates. While I'm not going to argue that paying tax is a moral imperative, I will argue that this is the kind of argument a wolf would make. In fact, wolves have been pointing out the whole "two wolves and a lamb" thing for a while now. This isn't an argument against democracy, it's a threat. "Give us what we want, or we'll stop asking nicely."
Collectivism and individualism are a false dichotomy. Any functional society requires both. Extreme collectivism was the fallacy of the Soviet Union, but extreme individualism has it's own problems.
I think we are seeing today that is not true. You seem to be under the same false narrative that the rich do not "pay their fair share", and the poor pay more than their far share when in reality nationally more than 50% of the population pays zero income tax, and 60-70% get more direct government transfer payments than they pay into the system
The people have been continually voting for more and more government largess funded mainly by debt, and by continually moving the goal posts on what "fair share" is and who should be paying that "fair share"
>>Free speech is not a pesky barrier that democracy tries to get around.... And for the record: yes Canada and the EU have free speech. Maybe not as extremely guarded as America does, but it's still there.
Canada and the EU disprove your statement, when people are arrested / convicted because their dog raised a paw on video, or because someone was offended by a tweet or have compelled speech laws to refer to people if they declare their preference... you can not claim to have free speech. Sorry no the EU nor Canada has free speech today.
>>I'm not going to get involved in the gun debate aside from pointing out that guns are not a backstop against abuses of government power. You have a pistol, they have nuclear weapons.
I guess UKR should just give up to Russia then if that is your logic.
In reality you can not control a nation or its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drones. The fighter jets can not kick down your door at 3AM to search your home... The military can not maintain a police state, and enslave a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening, glassing large area's.
The government would not want to kill all of this people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical in the first place.
Remember it took 20 years, 4 presidents, trillions of dollars, and plenty of tanks, jets, and military arms to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.... All the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal amounted to nothing.
So it is good you refrain from the gun debate as you would lose.
>While I'm not going to argue that paying tax is a moral imperative
not only is it not a moral imperative, Income based taxation is actively immoral and unethical.
Some types of Taxation could be ethical such as a Single Tax system on natural resources. Income based taxation should be viewed for what is it, theft of labor, something I assume you accuse the evil rich of doing
Cancel culture is a US thing, bro.
Having lived for more than a decade in both the US and France, I'd say the former is probably a bit more dystopic in terms of how awful it is if you're poor. Also, waaaayy more mass shootings (muh gun rights!).
The only real difference in free speech restrictions between the US and France is you're not allowed to be Nazi in France. You can critique the government all you want, the whole ultra-woke pronouns is somewhat present amongst leftist types but overall if you're a public figure (eg bigshot CEO) with a habit of saying outrageous things you're probably better off being French than American, you're less likely to get completely cancelled for saying something that isn't politically correct in France, although that may change.
> Some types of Taxation could be ethical such as a Single Tax system on natural resources. Income based taxation should be viewed for what is it, theft of labor, something I assume you accuse the evil rich of doing
Let's get one thing straight here - a government is a protection racket. They take your stuff, in return give you "protection", but the exchange is never voluntary - you can't really opt out short of leaving the country. Because the government needs to know just how much of your stuff to take, they invent money - you can read Graeber's Debt if you'd like more info on this, but basically, there's a reason all primitve coins had the heads of kings on them. Because now you know that every tax season you have to give the taxman X gold coins or risk being thrown in jail, gold coins are valuable.
Now if you define a rich person as someone with a lot of resources, you'll notice two things -
1) insofar as they are exploiting the labor of others to enrich themselves, they can only do so *with the help of the government*. Employment contracts only work when you have the threat of force to enforce them.
2) the government being a protection racket, the more you have to protect, the more work it has to do for you - the government do a lot more work making sure Bobby Billionaire's 3 houses don't get robbed, his private jet works because of all the massive technical and regulatory infrastructure that exists to make sure it doesn't fall out of the sky or crash into something, and his hundreds of happy collaborators are all educated in some common language so that they can efficiently create wealth and controlled by a legal system that ensure they won't do anything that could harm his business interest then it does for Homeless Harry who lives off of rats he manages to trap using a piece of moldy peanut butter as bait.
So they "rich people should pay more taxes thing" is not a moral argument - it's just business logic.
You expect AWS to charge Netflix more than some one dev team running a website that 5 people visit per year? Because it seems logical that if you get more value out of a business, that business will charge you more?
Congrats, you believe the rich should pay more taxes, by the logic expounded in the preceding paragraphs ^_^
feel free to ask for clarification if needed, or you can try to point out any flaws in my argument if you see any :)
The problem with state-appointed Senators is that it was warping gubernatorial politics. If you didn't like your Senator, you had to have the state governor replace him, and in practice most people were treating their vote for state governor as a senatorial vote anyway. Direct election of Senators just cut out the middleman.
Furthermore, we should be very careful with veto powers in a democratic system. Have you ever heard about a study which claims that the US is run by rich people? Well, the thing is, it's true, but not entirely. All classes are still capable of advancing an agenda. Louis Rossman can sit on a chair and yell into the microphone about right-to-repair[0] and get a bunch of state bills proposed. But rich people uniquely have veto power. They can, say, have a 'robust conversation' with a Senator or Representative to kill an R2R bill, or have New York State's governor change the R2R bill at the last minute to completely remove the legislative intent.
Filibusters are another veto mechanism; they raise the vote threshold from 50 to 60. Furthermore with the procedural filibuster they are significantly easier to use, so they get used all the time.
You know how Brexiteers were really mad about how the EU has a lot of unelected political appointees making law? They're not wrong about that. You see, whenever a political party in Germany, France, or the UK (pre-Brexit) wanted to push an unpopular policy, they'd make it into an EU-wide regulation and then blame the EU for it, because they think voters are stupid[1]. They were able to do this specifically because the EU works exactly like how the US Senate used to, with member state representatives not elected by the people and thus not accountable to them. And the only democratic accountability provided to stop this is to replace your member state's government with one that'll replace the appointee in the European Commission, which is now two levels of indirection.
Personally I'd rather live in the world with a straightforward democratic system with as little indirection as possible and few veto powers. Yes, you can point to rising populism as a counterargument, but the problem is that populism is rising because nobody's voice is getting heard. The more that the rich use their veto powers instead of relenting to the will of the majority, the more that the majority will turn to non-democratic means of power, and then we'll wind up in a dictatorship with exactly the kinds of people you don't want running things in office.
[0] Right to repair is a political campaign to undo several harmful effects of copyright and trade secrets law by explicitly requiring manufacturers to sell replacement parts and provide unlock codes to pair them onto equipment. It does not actually obligate them to repair the device, in fact that's counterproductive to the actual point, which is to restore ownership of your device (or car, or tractor) back to you.
[1] They're not.