A very wise man* once told me there are really
only three ways our
species has ever found to organize itself. The first is for one
guy --
a chief, a king, an emperor -- to tell everybody else what to
do. Over
the past 9500 years, since people started living together in villages,
towns, and cities, that's how the majority of human societies
have
worked.
A distressing number of them still do.
The second choice is for everybody to tell everybody else what
to
do. The Greeks thought this one up about 2500 years ago, but it
took a
couple of millennia to catch on, hitting its peak popularity about
two
centuries ago. Since then, it's been downhill all the way. There
are
some undeniable reasons for that; we'll examine a few of them
here.
The worst part is that this choice is inherently unstable, usually
reverting, fairly quickly, to one guy telling everybody else what
to
do.
We appear to be going through that process now.
The third choice is that nobody tells anybody else what to do.
Regrettably, this hasn't been explored very much, because there's
absolutely nothing in it for those who hunger for power over the
lives of others. Examples most frequently cited are ancient Ireland
and medieval Iceland, although there's a smidgeon of archaeological
evidence for it in Turkey, about 9500 years ago, at a place called
Catalhoyuk.
Given the way the world has bounced back and forth, just in
modern times, between the first choice and the second choice,
getting worse and worse practically every year, certainly every
decade -- "being shaved by an insane barber" is the
way Walter Huston put it in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
-- it's clear that we need a lot less of the first two choices
while we give the third choice a chance to prove itself.
INSTEAD OF WHAT WE NEED
Well, it's clear to you and me, perhaps.
Apparently it's not so clear to a gaggle of what my good friend
and colleague, cartoonist Rex "Baloo" May calls "squarepeggers"
--
bowtie and propellor beanie types who urgently desire to see America
run as that worst of all imaginable political systems, an absolute
democracy, an arrangement that, historically, has frequently been
described as a sheep and three coyotes voting on what to have
for
lunch.
They (the bowtie and propellor beanie types, not the coyotes)
call
themselves the "National Initiative For Democracy" or
"NI4D" (add a
dot com to that to find their website for yourself) when they
aren't
calling themselves "Philadelphia II", and it appears
that they got
their big idea from former United States Senator Mike Gravel of
Alaska, one of the few in recent political history who makes Al
Gore
-- or Jerry Brown, for that matter -- look like a staid conservative
statesman.
Or a model of sanity.
The gist of the thing is that they want to pass a law, add another
amendment to the Constitution, giving "the people" power
to end-run Congress and create new legislation -- new laws --
directly. I can see how this might seem like a good idea at first.
Humorist P.J. O'Rourke once suggested that the first six-hundred
people in the Manhattan phone book could do a better job running
the country than Congress ever has. But wasn't it Robert Heinlein
who observed that "Vox popula, vox dei" is
best translated as "How did we get into this mess?"
That doesn't stop them. In the words of NI4D's own website,
"The
National Initiative for Democracy is a proposed law ... creating,
for
the first time, a government 'by you, the people' ... [initiated
by] a
constitutional amendment and ... a federal statute that equips
the
people with the central power of government, lawmaking ... [Elsewhere,
they go further, asserting that "The central power of government
in a
democracy is lawmaking, not voting".] ... Citizens can gain
control of
their government by becoming lawmakers, stemming government growth
and
turning it to public benefit [historically, two entirely contradictory
objectives] ... Representative government remains unaltered except
for
[the] partnership established between the people and their elected
legislators."
Read that through slowly a couple of times, and you'll discover
that it doesn't make any more sense than it did the first time.
Also,
pardon my cynicism, but I seriously doubt that people like this
-- the
left wing socialists who call themselves "progressives"
these days
because they've damaged the good old word "liberal"
beyond any hope of
salvaging it -- have any interest whatever in "stemming government
growth".
OUTSIDE THE LAW
But perhaps I digress.
The part of their outfit that calls itself Philadelphia II,
they
tell us, "is conducting a national election ... to give [the
American
people] the opportunity to vote on the National Initiative ...
The
cycle repeats itself like a closed circuit ... When the number
of
'yes' votes exceeds 50,000,000, the National Initiative becomes
the
law ... "
Note that this is not a Constitutional procedure being
proposed here, but a sort of attempted electoral coup d'etat,
ratification by a strange, circular, extralegal process they've
made up in their own fevered brains that would somehow retroactively
establish its own legality. It would also involve an unspeakable
tangle of committees and procedures that are even more impenetrable
than the current forms, and which could easily be taken over (in
fact they seem designed for it) and operated by those -- like
the subcreatures we all remember who ran the student government
in high school -- whose lack of a life of their own gives them
plenty of time and energy to control the lives of others.
Go to their website; see for yourself if I'm exaggerating.
The "Electoral Trust" they plan to create along the
way is the
key. In effect, it would establish a parallel government that
would
preapprove -- or disapprove -- all proposed legislation in a manner
that isn't democratic even in the slightest. As described, this
right
little, tight little committee -- a carefully selected director
and
board -- would be our jailers. Control it, and you control everything
else. In short, this whole charade is a kind of Trojan Horse,
aimed at
installing a socialist dictatorship even worse than the one we
have
now.
Meanwhile, in addition to "volunteering your time, knowledge
and
experience" to carry off this coup for them, they urge their
readers
over and over again to donate, donate, donate. Rather than make
any
accusations of my own in this context, I urge all of you simply
to go
to Wikipedia's entry on Senator Mike Gravel for a glimpse at why
all
of this donating -- as well as NI4D's endless references to government
appropriations of various kinds and sizes once the Electoral Trust
is
established -- might be the real motivation behind the rest of
this
nonsense.
Pay particular attention to what happened to Gravel's Senatorial
pension, and to the unpleasant financial struggles he has had
ever
since. NI4D could be called the "Full Employment for Squarepeggers
Act".
Another way that NI4D would control elections and legislation
is
through electronic signatures. If you've been following the Diebold
case in California, you know that electronic voting has proven
easier
to corrupt than any other form, and is being abandoned now by
many
states. Most proponents of electoral reform want to return to
paper
ballots, perhaps even with receipts, but not NI4D, which also
plans to
conduct government business by public polling. I repeat, they
would
use poll results to pass new laws. From our long, bitter history,
gun
owners know, probably better than anyone else, how easily polls
can be
subverted.
It generally starts with how you ask the question.
THE TYRANNY OF DEMOCRACY
Meanwhile, according to NI4D, corporations (in this case, clearly
a left wing code word for organizations like the NRA, GOA, and
JPFO,
which were created in the first place to protect our freedoms),
or
anything else that NI4D didn't regard as a "natural person",
would be
strictly forbidden to participate in this strange process. This
very
essay would probably be deemed illegal. So much for NI4D and the
First
Amendment.
Just to make sure you understand: NI4D expects you to place
your
life, liberty, and property, and the lives, liberty, and property
of
your family, in the hands of 300,000,000 products of the public
school
system.
I don't think so, Mikey. The reason that we don't have direct
democracy in America, and were never intended to, is that the
Founding
Fathers, extraordinarily well-informed with regard to history,
were
every bit as worried about majorities violating the basic human
rights
of minorities as they were about the tyrannies imposed by kings.
They
installed some safety-valves in the system. Some of them -- like
the
election of U.S. Senators by state legislators, rather than by
popular
vote -- have been ruined over the years. Others, like the Electoral
College, are barely hanging on. At one time, in fact, you couldn't
vote unless you had something -- real property -- to lose in the
process.
Historically, the "will of the people" usually turns
out to be
nothing more than the latest scam of the latest con-man. It's
useful
to note that when Jane Fonda and her then-husband Tom Hayden started
to miss the good old anti-war days, the name they chose for their
new
vehicle to power was "economic democracy", a Progressive
code-name for
Marxism. Similarly, Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese philosopher and founding
father who toured the United States between 1905 and 1911, soliciting
contributions for what was always billed as a "democratic"
revolution
was in fact a socialist, revered today both in Taiwan and mainland
China.
At its best, Democracy is like a balloon in which we all get
hauled aloft by a huge ball of hot air and taken for a ride, whether
we want to be or not, with no idea where we're going, where we'll
come
down, or what condition we'll be in when we do. Apparently these
NI4D
worthies never heard of the French Revolution, or managed to observe
for themselves that, considered as a species, human beings simply
do
not play well in groups. Although people can be -- taken individually
-- astonishingly decent, bright, kindly, and inventive, it is
true
nevertheless that the effective intelligence of any group is that
of
its most intelligent member, divided by the number of people in
that
group.
GETTING A GRIP
I don't know about you, but I won't let my next-door neighbors
tell me what to do, and I certainly don't want 300 million "neighbors"
telling me what to do, either. For example, I don't care what
my lawn
looks like -- I rather prefer it tall and shaggy -- but I have
to cut
it to municipal specifications because the Nazified minions of
the
city government have threatened me, on more than one occasion,
with
kidnapping, injury, or death if I fail to comply. I have better
things
to do; this essay is a example. But mine is a sullen compliance
--
that's all they'll ever get out of me -- that will never accede
to
their fascistic coercion. And I have promised myself that I will
see
the obsolete institution of city government abolished altogether
in my
lifetime.
Is that what NI4D's brave new democratic world will be based
on,
sullen compliance and smoldering resentment engendered by threats
of
kidnapping, injury, or death to those who won't let everybody
-- or
those who claim to speak for everybody -- tell them how to live
their
lives? They should call themselves "Slavery Loves Company"
instead of
NI4D.
Face it: the problems of democracy cannot be solved by democracy,
any more than the problems of public education can be solved by
public
education. Duke University lacrosse players, who were falsely
accused
of a rape that never happened, had a chance to experience democracy
up
close and personal, when the socialist university faculty, the
student
body, a putrescently corrupt District Attorney's office, the mass
media, and the people of the city of Durham closed ranks against
them,
and either ignored or suppressed the overwhelming evidence of
their
innocence. If it hadn't been for a tiny handful of courageous
-- and
essentially anti-democratic -- correspondents and columnists,
they
might well have ended up in prison, or worse, despite their obvious
innocence.
Given what we've seen of the Duke case, or of popular prejudices
against certain individuals like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears,
Paris
Hilton, or Don Imus, we can predict that NI4D's egalitarian democracy
would collapse into a legislative lynch mob, coast-to-coast, in
about
twenty minutes. And, as advocates of pure democracy, NI4D can't
offer
us any assurances to the contrary that are worth even the hot
air
they're written in. The fact is, NI4D can't offer anything to
anybody,
because in a pure democracy, absolutely everything is up for grabs,
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As a consequence,
as Frodo
Baggins said to Gollum, "There's no promise you can make
that I can
trust."
A BETTER IDEA
To those on the left who might be attracted to NI4D, I offer
this
thought experiment: suppose for a moment, that my side in the
struggle
for the right to own and carry weapons got the upper hand (as
it seems
to be doing) and it was as nasty and dictatorial as the other
side has
always been. Under the system NI4D is trying to cram down everybody's
throats (demonstrating pretty plainly what side they're on), "We
the
People" could pass a law requiring that everybody must buy
and carry a
gun.
This means you. Get caught unarmed, go to jail.
Happily -- for you, my progressy little buddies -- an overwhelming
majority of individuals on my side of this issue are too decent
even
to contemplate such an outrage. However given the temptation of
an
ability to conduct national referenda about anything at the drop
of a
hat, who can say how long that decency would last, after the century
of vicious persecution that antigunners have subjected us to?
Quite
suddenly, a direct democracy doesn't seem nearly as attractive,
does
it?
When somebody tells you that individual rights don't exist,
or
that they're not absolute, it only means that you've got something
he
wants. My rights can never be cancelled out by sheer numbers.
Nor can
yours. Rights are not collective in character -- any more than
virtue
or intelligence are -- and no group has more rights than any single
individual within it. If each and every one of my 299,999,999
fellow
Americans decided tomorrow that I don't have a right to own weapons,
I'd go right on owning weapons, because my rights, which are inherent
simply in my existence as a human being, aren't subject to anybody's
vote.
With regard to the mess we find ourselves in today -- a pair
of
controversial wars overseas while the Bill of Rights gets raped
at
home -- not only do we need to fix it, we must do something once
and
for all about how we got here in the first place. One project
to begin
with is an International Bill of Rights Union. Another would be
a
Constitutional amendment creating a moratorium on all lawmaking
at
every level of government (except for bills of repeal) for the
next
century.
Or maybe the next millennium.
Either of these is preferable to NI4D's proposals because, unlike
NI4D and its not-very-well-hidden socialist agenda, these ideas
were
designed to engender genuine individual liberty. America doesn't
need
more voters, or more powerful voters. What America needs is fewer
thing to vote on. Likewise, America doesn't need more people making
laws, it needs fewer -- many fewer -- laws than we're burdened
with
now.
-------------------
* The late, great Robert LeFevre, who also maintained that there
were 15,000,000 federal laws (as of 1972, when I attended his
seminar in Wichita, Kansas) and reminded us that "ignorance
of the law is no excuse". --
=============================================================
Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been writing
about guns and gun ownership for more than 30 years. He is the
author of 27 books, the most widely-published and prolific libertarian
novelist in the world, and is considered an expert on the ethics
of self-defense. His writings may be seen on the following sites:
The Webley Page: http://www.lneilsmith.net
The Libertarian Enterprise: http://www.ncc-1776.net
The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel, Roswell,
Texas, and TimePeeper (August 2007): http://www.bigheadpress.com
LNS at Random (blog): http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/
LNS at JPFO: http://www.jpfo.net/filegen-a-m/lneilsmith.htm
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