24A014 Freedomandemocracy by Jim Davies, 4/16/2024

Those words are spoken by politicians so often that most people must imagine they mean the same thing, blurred together in this title as they usually are.

It's a rallying cry, a "thing" so obviously good and desirable to admit of no doubt or examination. If you don't favor freedomandemocracy, you can hardly be American.

But, pause and pry them apart, and we see reality. Not only do the two words have different meanings altogether, they contradict one another. If you have one half, you cannot have the other.

The "Freedom" part is, I hope, familiar to ZGBloggers; it's the enjoyment in real practice of the right, natural and inalienable, to own and operate one's own life. In case of doubt, click the adjacent link and read Freedom and How to Find It.

And no politician, eager to win votes so he can excercise rule and thereby shatter that natural right into fragments, is going to grant or extend freedom in a thousand years.

So to "Democracy", the evil twin: the word means, from the Greek, "rule by people" - the demos. The key to that is not the third word, but the first. It's still "rule." Since the "people" have a million different - and often contradictory - sets of opinions and priorities, what that must mean is the majority of the voting people. Hence one good definition: "Democracy is a system under which a majority can take from the minority all it wants, and call it fair."

In unavoidable practice therefore "the people" - millions of them - cannot possibly rule, so representatives are chosen to do it for them, perhaps acting on their promises to some of them but more often not, and then you have a clique, a ruling class. Its membership may change every four years or so, but a ruling class it is.

And rule by anyone (except each life's owner) is the antithesis of freedom.

Hence Freedomandemocracy is an oxymoron, QED. The political parasites who use the term so often are usually competent speakers who know what words mean, so they are well aware that they are spouting poisonous nonsense. Treat them as you would any other swindler or snake.