[hayst4ck]

There is a lot of academic talk about how focusing on democracy rather than constitutionality (rule of law) has done us a great disservice.

It turns out voting is much less important than limits on arbitrary executions of power.

Everything that's good comes out of their being "just" rules for the most powerful members of society, democracy can facilitate it, but does not guarantee Rule of Law.

Richard Fenyman on "cargo cult science": I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science. In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Democracy without Rule of Law is a cargo cult democracy. It is form without substance. It seems like it should produce good outcomes but doesn't.

The planes aren't landing...