"Democracy is both an obvious and dubious idea. Here's why democracy is an obvious idea: For most of history, most governments divided people into the few who rule and the many who obey. The few then used the state to advance their own private interests at the expense of the many. Rulers were less like noble protectors appointed by God and more like intestinal parasites. The obvious solution is to eliminate the distinction between those who rule and those who obey. Make every citizen both a ruler and a subject of that rule. This ensures government promotes everyone's interests. Thus, democracy is the best form of government. It's too bad it took most of civilized history to realize this-and too bad that the world isn't more democratic than it is. Here's why democracy is a dubious idea. Government decisions are high stakes. It decides matters of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, freedom or oppression. Yet we let incompetent people steer the ship of state. Most voters are ignorant and process what little information they have in biased and irrational ways. They fall prey to propaganda and demagogues. They are conformists and don't even try to vote their interests. Democracy is the political equivalent of drunk driving. Thus, democracy is a defective form of government. Democracy is a method by which the masses shoot themselves in their feet. Philosophy students often start essays by writing, "Since the dawn of time, humanity has pondered..." In this case, these arguments and concerns are old, if not dawn-of-time old. We find laypeople, pundits, social scientists, and philosophers making these two arguments today. But in ancient Athens, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle said similar things"--
Charles Babington , “ Supreme Court Lets Stand Ban on Blacks - Only Scholarships , " Washington Post , May 23 , 1995 , p . 1. The affirmative action case is Adarand Constructors v . Pena , 115 S.Ct. 2097 ( 1995 ) . 57.
In this Eighth Edition of American Democracy in Peril, author William E. Hudson provides a perceptive analysis of the challenges our democracy faces in the current era: economic crisis, partisan gridlock, rising economic inequality, and ...
( Stanley Fischer [ 1993 ] provides much of the basis for the discussion here . Fischer does recognize that causation can be in the other ... link certain taxes to the rate of growth . Increases in income taxes , for example , lower the ...
Delegates presented recommendations through six working groups that addressed the issues of judicial independence, judicial ethics, judicial administration and the role of court administrators, governance of the judiciary, ...
21, no. 1 (March), pp. 1–33. Bornstein, Morris (1992), “Privatisation in Eastern Europe', Communist Economies and Economic Transformation, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 283–320; revised in Bornstein (1994), pp. 468–510. Bornstein, Morris (ed.) ...
In this important new book, an international team of experts critically examines issues of democratic representation in three culturally diverse nations whose governments are elected under systems of proportional representation - New ...
The text marks the metes and bounds of official authority and individual autonomy . When one studies the boundary that the text marks out , one gets a sense of the vision of the individual embodied in the Constitution .
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Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centred innovation.