{"id":13281,"date":"2015-10-12T08:53:11","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T13:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13281"},"modified":"2015-10-12T08:53:11","modified_gmt":"2015-10-12T13:53:11","slug":"reflections-on-modern-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13281","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Modern Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reflections on Modern Democracy<\/a><\/h3>\n

Democracy\u00a0\u2013 but only when it goes your way!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the years of watching the\u00a0democratic\u00a0process I\u2019ve noticed something important.\u00a0 People tend to reject\u00a0democracy, indeed, fight it tooth and nail, when it doesn\u2019t go their way.\u00a0 But when it does, well, it is the tops.<\/p>\n

Consider the case of California\u2019s Proposition 187.\u00a0 Then governor Gray Davis of California was maneuvering to essentially gut this referendum, one that won with over 60% of the votes.\u00a0 So let us recognize that the leader of the\u00a0Democratic\u00a0Party in California has no problem rejecting what the majority of the people want when he and his friends believe that the people are wrong.<\/p>\n

\"\"Former California governor Gray Davis, a typical representative of the cronyism prevalent in the US merchant State. What eventually tripped him up wasn\u2019t his attempt to gut prop. 187 by legal maneuvering, but his perceived poor performance during California\u2019s energy crisis. Many of his energy advisors were the very speculators who benefited the most from the crisis. It was one affront too many. Davis was the first member of California\u2019s ruling caste to fall prey to a recall, after 117 previous recall attempts throughout California\u2019s history had failed, and only the 2nd<\/sup>\u00a0politician in US history to suffer this ignominious fate. During the boom of the 1990s, Davis had greatly expanded government spending, landing California with a near $35 bn. deficit when the bust inevitably struck.
\nPhoto credit: Patrick Fallon\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n

Now if you believe in\u00a0democracy\u00a0regarding the handling of certain problems in society, whether people actually have signed up for that process, you will go along with the verdict regardless of whether you like the outcome.\u00a0 That is a principled defense of\u00a0democracy.<\/p>\n

During all the health (Obama) care reform debates it is liberal Democrats who said, repeatedly, that their demand for a government supervised health care system merely expresses the will of the public and thus has ample legitimacy behind it.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reflections on Modern Democracy Democracy\u00a0\u2013 but only when it goes your way! Over the years of watching the\u00a0democratic\u00a0process I\u2019ve noticed something important.\u00a0 People tend to reject\u00a0democracy, indeed, fight it tooth and nail, when it doesn\u2019t go their way.\u00a0 But when it does, well, it is the tops. Consider the case of California\u2019s Proposition 187.\u00a0 Then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5728,101,204,9793],"class_list":["post-13281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-acting-man","tag-california","tag-democracy","tag-gray-davis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13282,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13281\/revisions\/13282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}