On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 10:46:33AM -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> Democracy has no checks and balances against the tyranny of the
> majority. Republics acknowledge Barnum's Law: "You can fool all the
> people some of the time" and insulate against it.
> Parliamentary systems are democracies, especially where there is no
> written and supermajority controlled constitution.
The problem here simply seems to be that Hoppe brought up the term
"democracy" to refer to "majority democracy" (where 51% of the voters
can legally decide to kill of the other 49%) rather than "liberal
democracy" where rights are built into the system. Whether this is
implemented through a republic or parliamentary system is irrelevant,
what really matters are the actual safeguards against infringing on
others rights.
Democracies in the west are hardly perfect and can likely be improved in
a lot of ways. But they are obviously working systems that provide a
stable foundation for fairly free and open societies. The issue is how
to enhance them to be even better foundations, and remove the public
choice risks that do exist.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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