Democracy, No. Freedom, yes!

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Have you noticed that wildly popular ideas, like terms limits and a balanced budget amendment, are always stopped while wildly unpopular ideas, like property tax and income tax, somehow get through and never go away? Have you ever noticed that the more our leaders tout “democracy” and use fears of any “threat to democracy” the less free you are to own your own property, make a decent living, speak your true mind, or just live your life and choose who to associate with?

We cannot ever have a real democracy. This is not about whether it’s a good idea, it’s just as impractical to say we can have a democracy as it is to mandate that every ride to work on a unicorn. Democracy requires total transparency, absolute free speech, truthfulness, and equitable participation by citizens only in a voting regimen that is 100% fraud-proof. To even have informed consent, we would need a free press that is assiduously dedicated to fairness, truth, and accuracy and that would never cater to partisan interests or corporate sponsors.

We cannot expect a true free press without bias, we cannot prevent a quasi-monopoly of a few press companies and platform owners from bottling up information dissemination and preventing any save their favored voices from being heard. To think otherwise and to somehow “manage for results” is untenable in the long-term, the best you can hope for is market disruptions that tend to shake things up and explode the number of voices before new dominance emerges and new disruptions are needed.

The internet of the early 2000s disrupted the information monopoly of the broadcast news and major newspapers, which was already under assault by talk radio. Today’s platforms and the press outfits favored by them have again created a controlled quasi-monopoly and partisan/biased bottleneck of information that once again renders any legitimate informed consent as to real issues and events impossible.

Having a system that is responsive to the sentiment, needs, and wishes of those it serves is desirable. The alternative to “democracy” isn’t autocracy. Our concern here, however, isn’t with a form of government, it is with the cause of justice through freedom and freedom is, in practical terms, a condition of maximum control over your choices being limited to you and those you freely choose to connect to. A perfectly competitive free market without monopolies and with maximum accountability to standards of equitable and just treatment of all participants is far more like a “democracy” than a system of potentially unfair elections where voters who cannot possible render informed consent decide who will dictate things to everyone else.

The movement away from top-down, centralized control and hierarchical “managing for results” which renders most people little better than children must take new forms outside of pure politics. This movement for real freedom, practical freedom, demands new private structures and institutions that have a more fraternal and/or market-based means of responding to the needs and sentiments of those they serve.

While the government and the monopoly corporations must be compelled on moral grounds to give way and respect as well as serve these new structures and institutions, their inherent right to exist stands outside and above any political law or corporate policy. In other words, private groups of people, within a broad freedom and justice standard, have a right to form their own freewill participatory arrangements as they see fit and all other existing institutions have a moral duty to respect and honor those arrangements and not impede them.

Take our concept of a privately created and run extended kinship community of people whose sociocultural and socioeconomic arrangements reflect shared belie, values, and convictions that are themselves essential to their shared identity. These groups of, say, around 120 adults ought to own the same right to create domiciles, perhaps little villages, for themselves that are regarded in the same legal framework as the private home of a nuclear family

We aren’t for gutting the fair housing law to allow discrimination, the point here is that what we consider family needs to be broadened, if we wish, to encompass what used to be larger extended family groups which by and large did cluster together for maximum mutual support based on shared beliefs, values, and convictions. We would not want whole towns to be made exclusive to one group, our aim being a free and pluralistic society of equals, but the idea an extended kinship community could not cluster together as in days of old is itself designed to atomize individuals and make them more pliable and controllable.

This is just an example of how we need to reshape public policy to devolve control from the corporations and the government to individuals, families, extended families, and local communities. Regardless of form of government or arrangements by which magisterial and civil/civic functions are supplied, even if through a more client-provider relationship, if the individual, the family, kinship communities, and local towns and cities have maximum practical freedom, no system of government can easily become autocratic.

On the other hand, if these “new” freedoms of freewill participation and the basic freedoms are not respected and if people cannot form their own private associations and networks where most of their needs are met through freewill participation, then an autocracy is inevitable. So we say, “democracy, no”, because “democracy”, even a republican form thereof, is practically impossible but “freedom, yes” because there are many ways to promote freedom regardless of the system of government.

It’s almost a distraction to focus so much on a form of government and so little on a real devolution of power and wealth from the mega corporations and centralized governments to individuals, families, extended families, and communities of different types, mostly based on freewill participation.

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