The Australian economy is of course faring well; but that is not to say a moral crisis is not impacting on Australia, as in other democracies. The popular resentment in of course against the major parties. There is of course a lot of angst with business. And to be fair, a great deal of 'big business' does involve some form of extortion. I cannot however bring myself to blame them for their pragmatic idiocy because they don't to be the 'moral agents' that politicians profess to be. After all, politics is 'applied morality'. Politicians enact laws; they decide the relationship between you and your neighbour; and they have a collectivised monopoly on the 'legitimate' use of force. There are types of applied force:
1. Initiation of force - such as forced taxation, subsidies using extorted wealth, unfair imprisonment without trial.
2. Force in defense or as a custodial measure, i.e. When the police protect people, or when govt regulation is intended to protect, as opposed to distorting markets to achieve some desired outcome.
The moral crisis becomes evident in the following article. About 10 years ago, Pat Corrigan and the National Farmers Federation used their collective financial muscle to break the unions who were using their labour union organisation to extort wealth from the shippers and taxpayers. Today, we have a different form of thuggery. We have a group of thugs 'encircling' Canberra. You might say they are there to protest. Well I say, why does a minority or majority matter? The debate should be not about physical extortion, but about the quality of ideas. Why does this become about 'numbers' or 'sacrifice' (as in the case of the protesters time, or the Indian currently on a hunger strike in that failing democracy). The problem with democracy is that its all about the wrong things. Its not about objectivity or ideas; its about the power of money and 'numbers'. We ought to be vetting the ideas of genius; not the thuggery of the mindless extorters who could bother less whether principles apply. They have concrete interests, and its mostly about protecting their previous privileges. Some of them might well be legitimate, but extortion doesn't make them any more righteous.
Globally about 10 democracies are currently in a state of crisis, whether central bank crises, debt crises, civil unrest. The one's I can think of are: UK, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, France, Greece, Spain, Portugal, USA, Japan and the Middle East. This is quite an array of democracies and authoritarian regimes. I would actually argue that democracy is an authoritarian regime. Why? Two reasons:
1. No objective standard of value - 'numbers, not reason'
2. No personal sovereignty - you are a means to some public (i.e. non-self end)
Any system developed on those terms is a tyranny because you have no choice, and you have no basis to achieve justice or accountability.
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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com
