Eleições II

(...) No wonder the very word democracy is missing throughout the entire Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Indeed, note how sternly anti-democratic are the first five words of the First Amendment on matters of abridging religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition: "Congress shall pass no law .... " Repeat, "pass no law."

So Ben Franklin, asked outside Independence Hall what kind of state the Fathers produced, replied with a famous proviso, "A republic, if you can keep it." Big if. I think Old Ben was warning us: As political democracy grows the individual shrinks.

Hear, for example, the prescient speech of Benjamin Disraeli, a young novelist and thinker – then a back-bench Tory M.P. but later twice becoming Britain’s Prime Minister – in the House of Commons, March 31, 1850 (Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations, Knopf, 1942, p. 484):

"If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, your freedom less complete."

Aristotle in his Rhetoric (c. 322 B.C., Mencken, op. cit., p. 275) also censured democracy as "when put to the strain, grows weak, and is supplanted by oligarchy."

So later thinkers such as George Bernard Shaw hit democracy in his Maxims for Revolutionists (1903, ibid., p. 277) for substituting "election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

Or as economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, who in his Democracy – The God That Failed (Transaction, 2001, p. 96), holds that "majorities of ‘have-nots’ will relentlessly try to enrich themselves at the expense of the ‘haves’."

America’s Other Democracy by William H. Peterson

PS: O problema está mais na mass democracy e menos na local democracy. A solução está em transformar a democracia política em democracia civil através das assembleias gerais das empresas, associações e condomínios regulados pelas suas constituições - os estatutos. O caminho para a solução chama-se privatização e descentralização política e administrativa. Não é uma utopia porque não promete nem felicidade nem pão, depende apenas da nossa vontade em alcançarmos o último dos fins políticos: o exercício em pleno do nosso livre arbítrio regulado pela única regra ética que permite a cooperação voluntária resultando em ordem social e paz: o direito de propriedade. O desenvolvimento económico é apenas o prémio que recebemos por o percebermos.