Capitol Ideas: Two Jeers for Democracy
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Two Jeers for Democracy The inability of elected governments to reduce the level of their spending, not just in Washington but all over the Western world, must at...
...The security of property was so essential, he said, that even the poor must understand the point and so would not press for redistribution...
...In the Chinatowns of America, their whole lives seem devoted to it...
...Democracy, especially at the early stages of development, will only mess things up...
...Maybe, but laying its foundations (in law, for example) would probably take decades, and in the long run we are all dead...
...That is what has happened in Russia, Argentina, and other countries...
...The demos will try to divide the economic pie before there is a pie to divide...
...a means, not an end...
...One of the most stunning trends of the late twentieth century, in the universalization of certain norms," he said, "has been the universalization of the franchise...
...Finding the answer should be of paramount interest to political scientists and economists...
...Even then it may be doubted whether the universal franchise is appropriate...
...Rarely is it analyzed outside the scholarly journals...
...As for the franchise, one in twelve adult males could vote in England before the Reform Act of 1832, about one in seven until 1867...
...The demagogues of our own day, zealous to please the peoples of the states, cause a large amount of property to be confiscated to public use by means of the law courts," wrote Aristotle in The Politics...
...The grievances of colonialism and oppression must be redressed right away...
...a mechanism for replacing some office holders with others...
...In the same way, instant democracy disorders the political economy...
...If you can get that without democracy, as the Hong Kong Chinese did, maybe you are in business...
...Thus was democracy debased...
...It is something that must come later rather than earlier...
...Having completed a three-year tour of duty in Africa for the Washington Post, Keith Richburg wrote Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa—a rebuttal of conventional foreign policy nostrums that is rare indeed from the pen of a working journalist In Africa, he writes, democracy was supposed to be the answer...
...Most economists will tell you now that nations must embrace markets if they are to prosper...
...To get the political architecture right, you must do things in the right order...
...The recipient classes—yes, including farmers and businessmen who receive subsidies —must be disenfranchised, and the vote restricted to taxpayers...
...The new nations can't afford to wait...
...Equally obviously, they were unable to make use of these talents under Communism...
...Before voting was democratized in England in the nineteenth century, the advocates of reform repudiated any redistributive intent...
...Sometimes it is criticized —when fundamentalists may win, for example...
...May I suggest, then, that the time has come for us to set a good example...
...I once heard Hernando de Soto point out that when the correct laws are not in place (as is true all over the Third World), and the people cannot get clear title to land, the construction of informal housing will take place in reverse order...
...They will give rise to competition and everything good will follow from that...
...CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Two Jeers for Democracy The inability of elected governments to reduce the level of their spending, not just in Washington but all over the Western world, must at some point give rise to second thoughts about democracy...
...To register, voters must produce a Social Security card, a picture ID, and a copy of last year's tax returns...
...Democracy is procedural, not substantive...
...This will foster a sense of justice and encourage people to be productive...
...We hear of the need for it, the failure of it, the expansion of it, the overthrow of it, even the occasional success of it...
...Voting is not a right but an official act...
...You don't need full liberty of speech either—they certainly didn't have it in Adam Smith's England...
...Little has changed...
...By 1965, nonetheless, democracy in the United States had slipped fully down the slope anticipated by the nineteenth-century conservatives...
...In the same way, democracy will ensure political competition...
...He was wrong about that...
...But it arrived only in 1995...
...For that reason, the press touts it without further ado...
...Democracy was not historically a precondition for the emergence of such a rule of law in the Western world...
...How did this tremendous success come about...
...So, allow the people to vote...
...Nowhere else in the modem world—with the possible exception of Singapore—has there been a comparable success...
...Democracy and markets are thought of as disembodied, self-explanatory, self-sufficient entities that can be conjured up by willpower...
...I t is unquestioned today that democracy means universal franchise, and this is what we always try to impose on others...
...The verbal link between demagogue and democrat is rarely noted today, although it was once well understood, and feared...
...then walls, finally if they're lucky they may get a utility hook-up...
...In our day democracy is endlessly promoted...
...And, yes, without freedom of speech...
...er a majority of the voters wants them to do (as long as they don't restrict the freedom of the press...
...But do it right now...
...The assumption is that if elections are held frequently, and the number of voters has metastasized sufficiently, so that practically all adults are allowed to vote, government will be good...
...If politicians want them, then they can have them...
...Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew got it right when he blamed Westerners who "foist their system indiscriminately on societies in which it will not work...
...What is needed first is a system of law that treatseveryone equally, penalizes wrongdoers, and gives security to property and its exchange by contract...
...This showed a profound disrespect, both for government and for education itself The idea that you do not need to know anything at all, or how to read or write, or "understand or interpret any matter," in order to qualify for the privilege of voting, was nothing less than an insult to the framers of the Constitution...
...Elections must not become] the kind of "winner-take-all" contests that now produce factional warfare...
...He identified democracy as a perversion of constitutional government...
...Democracy was belatedly instituted by the parting Brits mainly as a way of embarrassing the Chinese...
...And if it had existed in its present, universal form, it undoubtedly would have prevented such a system from emerging at all...
...Now and then we hear a dissenting voice...
...The reformers, who sought only a less restrictive franchise (not universal voting), replied that they accepted the conservatives' principles...
...Here is a breath of fresh air from an unexpected quarter...
...So institutions are crucial —but which ones...
...The wording of the 1965 Voting Rights Act would have truly shocked the liberals of the nineteenth century...
...John Stuart Mill wrote in 1861 that it was "required by first principles that the receipt of parish relief [welfare] should be a peremptory disqualification for the franchise...
...No representation without taxation...
...We must restore the old understanding that voters are office-holders...
...Hong Kong developed into the world's leading economy without benefit of democracy...
...Something like that applies politically as well...
...Someone well said that democracy is rule by publicity...
...All the other intricate parts and functions of government can be overlooked...
...20 September 19 97 • The American Spectator majesty, and sometimes threw editors in jail for objecting to British rule...
...Majority rule will take care of them...
...The Chinese people are good businessmen, obviously...
...Such tests, of course, must be applied without regard to race, creed, or color...
...22 September 1997 • The American Spectator...
...The act outlawed any requirement that those registering to vote shall "demonstrate the ability to read, write, understand or interpret any matter," or shall "demonstrate any educational achievement," or show "knowledge of any particular subject," or "possess good moral character...
...Democracy is to political science what markets are to political economy...
...Security and police forces, now mostly tools of repression, need to be brought under neutral command and control....Parliaments and judiciaries must be strengthened...
...On abstruse topics far from home—the budget deficit—the people will think precisely what they are told to think...
...The colony's governor appointed the members of Hong Kong's legislative council, insisted on his right to approve public gatherings, scrutinized the press for evidence of leseShouldn't only taxpayers be allowed to vote...
...Before elections are held, constitutions need to be rewritten to reduce the role of imperial presidencies...
...The more basic question is to what extent democracy is needed...
...Larry Diamond, editor (with Marc Plattner) of the Journal of Democracy, does not know of any country, among those that are considered democracies, where the franchise is restricted or voters are tested...
...Constitution...
...Foundations are probably never built...
...Tests comparable to those that aliens must pass if they are to be admitted to citizenship were actually outlawed for all those born and raised here...
...It is understood that elected office holders may do whatevTom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Both are thought to institutionalize competition in their respective realms...
...Keynes did real harm with his one-line disparagement of long time-horizons...
...The same tendency is observable all over the world...
...But in covering election after election, he soon saw that much preparatory work needed to be done: Elections are too easily manipulated and stolen, and in many cases end up doing more harm than good, allowing dictators to wrap themselves in a new aura of legitimacy...
...If need be, phone up Jimmy Carter and send over the election observers...
...Is there anything better on offer...
...And he was the big liberal of his day...
...For their part the conservative opponents of reform used weak, slippery slope arguments: Where would it all end...
...Tears were shed when democracy came to an end in Hong Kong...
...The reason for this is not clear, but it is a good bet that many countries have been following the American example...
...Literacy tests having been used in grossly discriminatory fashion against blacks, American reformers responded, illogically, by outlawing not the discrimination but the tests...
...Without those basic steps, any election becomes a sham, a charade of democracy...
...Squatters bring furniture with them...
...Yet I do not know of a single public figure today, no matter how conservative he or she is said to be, who has called for a reform of voting: restricting it (for example) to those who can read or write, or can show some rudimentary understanding of the U.S...
...then they put up a makeshift roof...
...As a slogan its tendency is to reduce the complex machinery of government to a few simple features: majority rule...
...It was the "much-hyped" solution bandied about by the well-meaning academics and Africa specialists who briefed him before he went abroad...
...If, with the first political winds, the tent is blown away, a new one will be recommended by our Departments of Poli-Sci...
...One obvious possibility is this: What you need first is the rule of law as it was developed in England...
...It is not hard to understand that to build a house, you have to bring in and assemble the parts in the right sequence...
...Another parliamentary reformer, the economist David Ricardo, argued that property rights were so essential to good government that "I would agree to deprive those of the elective franchise against whom it could be justly alleged that they considered it in their interest to invade them...
...Bentham, Ricardo, and Mill had no difficulty in agreeing that of course voters would have to be able to show some educational achievement...
...Universal franchise and majority rule permit a cadre of opinion shapers to impose its will on the nation by manipulating an uninformed mass electorate...
...For more than 14o years, the British had shown "no inclination to temper their benevolent autocracy by letting Hong Kong Chinese have a role in the politics of the place," according to former assistant secretary of defense Charles Freeman...
...Abroad, democracy is thought of as a magic tent that can be set down on the rough terrain of tyranny...
Vol. 30 • September 1997 • No. 9
