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Subject: 
Re: Democratic? (was: Sticking my gun ...)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.debate
Date: 
Tue, 23 Sep 2003 00:06:16 GMT
Viewed: 
640 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Frank Filz wrote:
I guess it all comes down to whether you believe people are inherently
good or governments are inherently good. The way I see it is that a
government is just a collection of people, and therefore has no special
claim of goodness beyond the basic goodness of people, and therefore, if
there is any basic goodness in the world (and there does seem to be
basic goodness in the world), it must be an inherent goodness of the
people. What really makes the world tick is that we have a sufficiently
similar understanding of goodness that we are able to form collective
opinions. A government is ultimately just a formalized collection of
those collective opinions. A democratic government is then superior to a
non-democracic government then because it forms that collective opinion
based on the input of more people.

However the party system stuffs all that up by forcing members to vote "along
party lines" instead of how their constituents want them to vote (except in
conscience votes, which don't happen often in parliament). Note that I'm
referring to Australian parliament here - other countries may be different...

ROSCO



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Sticking my gun where it doesn't belong...
 
(...) You know, I just don't think many people really think about the implications of 1775 (which is actually far more relevant to this debate than 1776, by 1776 the whole thing was well under way). How many people have thought about the (...) (21 years ago, 19-Sep-03, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)

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