Vivat Libertas

I am so  sick of hearing that capitalism and democracy depend on each other, or even that they can coexist. The excuse for this is normally the evil bugbear of authoritarian communism, which frankly I will admit didn't work too well - but neither does capitalism, so you can stop waving the capitalist flag now. The fantasy is one of freedom - freedom to buy, freedom to choose, freedom to spend your way to a better life. Combine that with representative democracy supposedly giving the ordinary citizen a voice and you've got the perfect, shiny, consumerist dream of a greedy machine pouring money into politics and in doing so making everyone's lives better... ...wait, what? This is the trouble with claiming capitalism and democracy can coexist. Democracy is about rule by the people - in other words, you get ordinary people making the decisions, not kings, bishops or some kind of political caste. And yet this is exactly what's happened; most normal people don't stand...

I'm really sick of elitism. I know other people are, too. I don't expect to be making any groundbreaking statements - I never do; I specialise in common sense. But I'm really sick of people who complain about how the ordinary person on the street isn't sufficiently advanced and enlightened for any kind of free society. Instead, they say, we should all be subject to someone else's authority for a strong society - or who knows what could go wrong?! Heavens, people might agitate for things like equality and a society that doesn't exploit people! Well, quite apart from the morality of an autocratic state, there are obviously problems with the idea that a despot makes for a better ruler - namely, there is no evidence that a single ruler, or a few rulers, are better than letting everyone weigh in on an issue. In fact, concentrating all the power in the hands of just one person is probably not  a good idea, as the needs of an entire state are then subject to the ...