[gragas]

>Democracy is not a failure, if you believe democracy is a failure, you're saying that your ability to control your own life is a failure.

Interesting, I would interpret democracy as the ability for others to control my life; the ability for the majority to gang up on a smaller group and impose laws which benefit the majority in lieu of the minority.

[y80]

>I would interpret democracy as the ability for others to control my life

Interesting, I'd disagree though. Say you live in a fascist society or a feudalist society, you get absolutely no say. Democracy allows us to make decisions that influence our own life, however we must obviously respect the fact that we live in a society with other people, and they must be respected. Beyond living in a vacuum, we have no real way to ensure absolute individual freedom, however a completely democratic society is one way of reconciling the thirst for individual freedom with the necessity of cooperation with others.

>The ability for the majority to gang up on a smaller group and impose laws which benefit the majority in lieu of the minority.

This is absolutely a valid concern, which is why I believe in a rigid groundset of rules on which all laws and rules must comply (consitutions/bill of rights) which respect the rights and liberties of individuals to ensure they have maximum freedom with respect to other individuals in society. This isn't a groundbreaking idea, but I do believe we need to re-evaluate these approaches in a modern context, as most countries were established in a time before progressivism was dominant.

[gragas]

I've really become more and more for states' rights as time goes on. It's very clear that most states (especially rural states) fundamentally disagree with California, New York, and the other blue strongholds.

I want to preserve the culture I grew up in. I want everyone to contribute to society. I want a culture where what you get is what you worked for. I don't want "diversity" or a bunch of people from other countries to move to the town I grew up in.

Having moved to California from Iowa, I can totally understand how Californians value diversity and equality (not necessarily equal opportunity) above all else. But where I'm from, people value equal opportunity and hard work. It's very hard to see the merit in one culture, being from the other.

In my mind, it would be an absolute travesty to allow the distant majority to vote for the destruction of the culture I grew up in.

[sjclemmy]

>> I don't want "diversity" or a bunch of people from other countries to move to the town I grew up in.

Yet you have moved to California? Can you hear the irony?

>> It's very hard to see the merit in one culture, being from the other.

You don't have. You just have to accept other people think differently and want different things to you.

[gragas]

Yes, I accept that other people think differently than me. But that should not give the right for Californians to overthrow my community and my culture which exists thousands of miles away from California.

[ZenoArrow]

> "Having moved to California from Iowa, I can totally understand how Californians value diversity and equality (not necessarily equal opportunity) above all else. But where I'm from, people value equal opportunity and hard work. It's very hard to see the merit in one culture, being from the other."

How is diversity diametrically opposed to equal opportunity and hard work? From what I can see you can have all of the above without any issues.

[eli_gottlieb]

>I want to preserve the culture I grew up in. I want everyone to contribute to society. I want a culture where what you get is what you worked for. I don't want "diversity" or a bunch of people from other countries to move to the town I grew up in.

>Having moved to California from Iowa, I can totally understand how Californians value diversity and equality (not necessarily equal opportunity) above all else. But where I'm from, people value equal opportunity and hard work. It's very hard to see the merit in one culture, being from the other.

Can you phrase your political philosophy in terms of real proposals rather than thought-terminating cliches? When I hear the term "value" or "values", I reach for my gun.

[zigzigzag]

Significant relaxation of federal power is the only way USA and Europe can be politically stable over the long run, but good luck getting people to let go of the idea of federalism.

[ZenoArrow]

How so? The general public in the USA and Europe seem fairly docile, we've had massive political scandals on both side of the Atlantic over the past couple of decades, and the general public barely reacts at all (in any meaningful way at least, in terms of organising resistance).

[zigzigzag]

You don't think the political events of 2016 count?

Consider what might happen if Clinton win and more corruption scandals appear about her, or if Brexit is halted somehow. Things are getting less stable over time.

[Hondor]

Bills of rights don't address the problem of the majority voting to define crimes that suit themselves and punish the people who commit them, even if they're not very bad. For example, various drug and sex related laws that keep changing and we can never agree if something should be an important right to be supported or a crime to be punished.

[y80]

Very true, but if you dig down at the root causes of drug dealing and sex trafficking, you'll see a definite profit motive which drives these systems, that is capitalists which monopolize these trades and continue them for profit. Drug cartels are a perfect example, and basically all organized crime. People who voluntarily participate in these systems (i.e. drug dealers and prostitutes) do so usually out of desperation and the necessity of a capitalist society where poverty means participate in shady pursuits (especially when you're alienated from the work force due to blacklisting like having gone to prison) or go hungry.

I am however not saying that a purely democratic society would eliminate all of societies ills, I'm saying it would make many of the constructs which perpetuate these sorts of problems would become non-viable.

[Sniffnoy]

> Interesting, I'd disagree though. Say you live in a fascist society or a feudalist society, you get absolutely no say.

These are hardly the only alternatives. In case you haven't noticed, the other people here aren't implicitly contrasting democracy with e.g. monarchy; they're implicitly contrasting it with anarchy (probably anarcho-capitalism).

Again, there's lots of possibilities out there. Personally I like the idea of futarchy, though it's untried. But that's not the point; the point is, there's a lot of degrees of freeom here.

[pyrale]

Anarchy (and some of its branches) value very much the values of democracy, with the added benefits of stressing the search of compromise.

In my opinion, anarcho-capitalism is merely feudalism, with some brainwashing for people to accept their fate. There's a reason some prominent anar-capitalists want to be differenciated from anarchists.

[damptowel]

Isn't anarchocapitalism a contradiction in terms? Capitalism is perhaps the most statist of all forms of society. It's development coincided with the birth of the nation state. Markets have been a part of human societies since the birth of agriculturalism, but it was the state that created the large scale market systems required for capitalism to flourish. Historically markets were established in conquered areas to support standing armies. The same story for currency, which is introduced alongside the market as a means of tax payment levied upon the population by the conqueror; the army comes with the currency and the population has to acquire it through market transactions with them. Schooling is another big one, the Karolingian expansion first instated it in Europe and around the time of the industrial revolution there was a clear need of schooling the peasantry into the new market driven systems, unifying disparate dialects, teaching basic arithmetics, making sure they can read instructions and do basic record keeping. It's around that time you see the establishment of new public institutions such as prisons and police for enforcing private property law, expansion of courts for arbitrage, the list goes on. Almost all of the foundations of capitalism were created by state power and coercion.

[Sniffnoy]

You're reasoning based on a name. Names are not necessarily accurate descriptions. From what I've read of theirs, it doesn't seem that anarcho-capitalism would support capitalism in the sense you describe.

Remember, "capitalism" is an overloaded term. Sometimes it means what you describe, and sometimes it means the free market. Make sure you know what sense it's being used in in a given context, or you can't have a meaningful discussion! In the case of anarcho-capitalism, it refers to the free market. (But even though that works out in this case, you really should be wary of reasoning based on names.)

[y80]

>In my opinion, anarcho-capitalism is merely feudalism, with some brainwashing for people to accept their fate. There's a reason some prominent anar-capitalists want to be differenciated from anarchists.

There's also a reason all anarchists want to be differentiated from ancaps ;)

[lisivka]

> Interesting, I would interpret democracy as the ability for others to control my life;

Yep, but you have exact same right to control life of others, so things are balanced.

> the ability for the majority to gang up on a smaller group and impose laws which benefit the majority in lieu of the minority.

Constitution and court protects us from abuse, so don't worry about minorities in Constitutional Democracy.

[ZenoArrow]

I would interpret the predominant style of capitalism we have in the same way.

Centralisation of power is the issue, it doesn't matter if that centralised power is held by governments or by large corporations, the end result is a tilting of the playing field in favour of those with the most power.

[wyager]

> I would interpret democracy as the ability for others to control my life

That's probably because you're thinking in terms of how things actually are, rather than in terms of vague emotions tacked onto political buzzwords. A classic mistake.