KAZVorpal
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quote:
ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
1) Universal education is required for an active civil society.
2) Your opinion that the government, or any other teaching body, is spewing propaganda, does not detract from point 1.
You seem entirely too intelligent to make (1) your central point, without supporting it in the least. Did you learn this in a government school, perhaps?
What is required, for a healthy society is private property rights, and all commensurate individual liberties and responsibilities.
The rest comes from that, because people wish what is best for themselves, and so left free they will strive to obtain those things, and do a better job...overall...than if they have civil masters pretending to obtain and guarantee those things for them.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
3) Who is going to pay for the education of children from unemployed and low income families? It can only be done through redistribution of wealth i.e. tax.
This begs the question of your entirely unsupported (1).
But even if (1) were true...and you really do need to demonstrate that it's at least arguable...(3) would be false, because in a free society, the "poor" tend to be much wealthier than in any government-safety-net society. The massive cost of government education is one of the things that keeps some people in the US too poor to afford to privately school their children. In the US, government schools spend over ten thousand dollars per student, per year, in the places where its results are the worst. Give one third of that amount to the parents of the students in the form of a voucher to choose their own school, and the children would receive better education. This would represent a compromise from the even-superior option of eliminating the massive educational tax burden and letting people afford, therefore, to school their children directly.
In fact, in the US it is universal education that traps the poor without real education at all. The middle class frequently (it's approaching ten percent of all children in the US, and mostly middle class) homeschool, while the higher a family is economically, the more likely they are to pay for private education, despite having to shoulder an even higher per-student burden in taxes to fund incompetent government schools.
The poorest cannot afford to homeschool, nor to privately school, so public schools trap them in a system that does them more harm than good.
For ten thousand dollars per year.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
It doesn't make sense to you because of your personal (possibly cultural) values, just as unregulated capitalism doesn't make sense to the Russians. Yes, you could term democracy as "tyranny of the majority", as I've already conceded with Real0ne, but this is a negative view of democracy. Others would term democracy as aiming to build a better society: equal opportunity, mass participation etc.
Actually, there's no serious definition of "democracy" that inherently includes what you are describing, at all. I do understand that it's what government schools teach "democracy" to be, by ignoring its roots and simply describing the promises of socialist parties who usurp the word "democracy" (as with other ones, like liberal and left wing, in the US), but it's still irrelevant from an etymological or philosophical perspective.
I am happy to discuss the destructive nature of economic egalitarianism of the kind you government may be instilling in your culture as a core belief system, but it really isn't "democracy". It is not self-rule, it is not rule by the people, it is simply a bundle of nanny-state promises eating up your natural rights, while failing to provide what it promises in return.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
Of course democracy has a stance towards civil liberties: it is underpinned by liberal ideals of freedom, tolerance, and the freedom to chase individual business initiatives, but not at the expense of the "better society".
Rule by the people requires the protection of natural rights as an absolute. It's not a "stance", any more than natural rights themselves are some temporary priveledge handed out by a government the way "civil liberties" are. You cannot have true self-rule without freedom. It's not an underpinning, so much as a prime requisite. "Tolerance" is something that must be left to the individual, though, aside from it being required that the goverment of a free society be completely tolerant of its members' choices within their own property rights. Individual business initiatives, of course, are just a subset of "freedom".
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
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ORIGINAL: KAZVorpal
"Equal opportunity" is only a valid goal when it is in regards to government measurement of justice. To violate natural rights in order to force equality of outcomes, as with socialism, is quite literaly evil.
You're confusing equal opportunity with equal outcome; I'm not talking about equal outcome, nor socialism. I'm talking about the ideals of democracy: mass participation i.e. everyone having a stake in the nation.
Your arguments, though, sound socialist. They are about equal outcome, not opportunity. Everyone should be equally free to educate their own children...not have equally dismal education as a government guarantee. That is equal outcome. People end up being better educated when left free to take care of this for themselves.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
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ORIGINAL: KAZVorpal
Actually, a system where everyone is FREE to chase their whims and desires, to the extent that they can do so without violating everyone else's similar freedom, is precisely what democracy is about. Not majority rule, which is actually a vessel for tyranny, but actual self-rule.
The following relates to the part in bold; I think this gets to the crux of the matter:
A few pointers on the original ideals of democracy:
1) A liberal economic system.
2) An active civil society.
3) Mass participation.
Where did you get the impression that these things were such universal assumptions that you could simply cite them without explaining why you think they're requirements?
Aside from them not being anything even vaguely like "original ideals" of either majority rule, or self-rule by the people. You didn't have the latter two in classical Greek democracy, and there's no evidence that they're necessary in American self-rule, either.
The kind of "participation" that is required for self-rule is just that...ruling oneself. THAT is the participation that needs to be massively universal. Everyone must be overlord of himself and his property, or else the society slowly declines, as each one has done throughout history as their governments became stronger and more centralized.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
Without taxing people (redistribution of wealth), you can't have mass participation in society;
Again an undefended assumption, which seems sound only through inductive reasoning.
In reality, each person will participate in real democracy simply by being free of exactly that kind of tax and regulatory burden. Individual freedom is the ultimate distributed-processing system of societal participation.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
remember that Western democracy is an ideal that sprung out of a massive wealth gap and widespread poverty/destitution,
You need to defend that, too. Western democracy sprung from increased liberty, not a wealth gap. The ever-stagnant authoritarian governments of Europe do have their origins in the lies of the Marxists about terrible wealth gaps in the mid 19th century, but that's only "western democracy" in the pejorative sense.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
and, in its simplest form, democracy aims to build a better society for all; one in which everyone has a stake in the nation: everything is geared towards that objective.
No, especially in its simplest form, democracy lets each person decide what is a "better society" for himself, instead of letting the ruling class decide that this means "one in which everyone has a stake in the nation", or anything else.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
'Truth be told, we're going at this from different personal (possibly cultural) ideals, and, actually, both of our points of view are valid in the sense that both have been deemed to be democracy in practice at different points in history.
I am aware that authoritarian rulers calling themselves "social democrats" in Europe say words that sound like what you are describing, above, but they still have nothing to do with actual democracy, at all. You could certainly argue that these things could come from some kind of majority rule system, but they're authoritarian socialist promises, not "democracy" in any "original" sense.
Well, unless "original" means "invented of whole cloth, recently" instead of "what came first".
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
To illustrate, commentators speak of two versions of liberty: positive liberty and negative liberty.
Actually, it's positive and negative rights. Not liberty.
To use "liberty" to mean "the removal of liberty" is horribly oxymoronic. Positive rights are powers to take things from, or otherwise restrict the free choices of, others...they therefore violate ALL forms of liberty.
Negative rights are the only kind that are "liberty" at all. A negative right is a natural choice you have, if not restricted by social violation. A positive "right" is a claim you are granted against other people, by an authoritarian government. Like the "right to a good job" violating someone else's natural right to his product of labor, so the government can provide someone with a makework job to replace the real one he has refused to earn honestly.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
Democracy was founded on positive liberty (underpinned by mass participation in society), you're advocating negative liberty: a modern day ideal proposed by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s, in response to the spread of communism, and adopted by the Americans and British when Reagan and Thatcher were voted into government.
One problem here may simply be that my view is not restricted to 160 years of European Marxism. Isaiah Berlin did not invent the idea of natural rights and "negative liberty"; these have not only existed as long as literacy has been adequate to record them, but were the dominant philosophy of the Enlightenment era. They did not simply cease to exist just because of the Revolution of 1848 making a brutal transition from feudalism to its authoritarian clone in socialism.
It is, in fact, "positive liberty" that is the relative newcomer. The idea that people can be forced to do things "for the good of society" not because some God-decreed ruler says so, but because everyone is taught in government schools that this is the right way to be can only be traced back as far as the French Revolution. It is the Saint-Simon school of thought, and is predated by Enlightenment recognition of the superiority of a society organized around natural rights.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
For 80 years in Britain, and say 60 years in the US, the invisible hand of the market was deemed to be inadequate in terms of providing for all of the people: governments' original roles of justice and defence widened to economic and social regulation i.e. positive liberty.
Yes, and the outcome of such ideas has been increasing economic stagnancy, with only bursts of economic liberty to keep the economies concerned afloat.
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ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
I'll suggest that our difference of opinion is not really anything to do with democracy, but, rather, is centred around a disagreement on what constitutes freedom; speaking for you, I'll estimate that your version of freedom is the freedom to choose, that's not my opinion: I think this is why we have different opinions on democratic ideals.
As with your idea of democracy, your idea of freedom is the polar opposite of the very etymology of the word. It's like American socialists adopting the word "liberal", which actually means "advocate of individual liberties", which is the opposite of everything they believe in.
As I said about economic egalitarianism, I'm happy to discuss the inherent failures of violating natural rights in order to impose your idea of a collectively unified society...but it's simply not any form of "freedom" or "liberty" at all. It is the violation of those things. Even if it were better, it'd still be a violation of those things.
Calling the abrogation of liberty "positive liberty" is absolutely doubleplusgoodthink.
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