Democracy: The God That Failed

On the Definition of Democracy:Con's definition of democracy is invalid because he fiats in the assumption that people will actually control the government. This is equivalent to me stipulating that the monarch will be a nice person. His definition describes monarchy just as well as democracy because the citizens of a monarchy influence government action.Criteria:I accept Con's criterion of personal and political freedom as valid. Based on the above round, we can conclude that monarchy accomplishes these objectives better than democracy. However, Con is wrong in criticizing economic prosperity as an objective: ultimately, enhancing the material well-being of each individual is the goal of every society.Direct Rebuttals:CA1. Subjects vs. CitizensCon's social contract argument fails for two reasons: There is no actual social contract[1]. Con cites the Constitution, but no one alive today agreed to it or had any part in writing it. In both monarchy and democracy, citizens are ruled by the government they are born under whether they agree or not unless they leave. Con says that citizens can opt out of the contract, but this is patently false: in order to opt out you must leave, as under monarchy[2]. Con cannot cite any practical differences; the alleged differences are just rhetoric. Democracy fails to actually achieve increased freedom. Government authority has only expanded under democracy[3]. Examples of government action that people would not reasonably agree to under a contract that take place often under democracy but seldom under monarchy include the income tax, eminent domain, suspension of habeas corpus, conscription, and the socialization of private services such as mail delivery[4,5,6,7,8]. There is no substance to this argument. I agree that the relationship between monarch and subject is illegitimate (I'm an anarchist, after all), but that does not make the relationship between citizen and state under democracy any better. The democratic state has collected information on us and assigned us numbers at birth, attempting to care for us from cradle to grave while spying on us and deciding what we must and cannot put in our bodies the whole time[9,10,11,12,13]. We are far more the property of the state now under democracy than subjects who nominally belonged to a king who had limited authority over them in practice.CA2. Democracy is More JustCon's argument is that the fickle nature of monarchical succession creates uncertainty. However, monarchical succession is overall an advantage because it allows for good or harmlessly incompetent leaders to come to power[14]. A bad monarch is likely to be overthrown and replaced, as happened in the French Revolution after a failed democratic experiment[15]. By contrast, democracy assures that only bad people will rise to power. Election in a democracy is based on demagoguery and making promises to the mob to satisfy their whims, not on actual ability. The leaders in a democracy will always be the most corrupt charlatans in society[16]. Furthermore, because individual votes have a low impact on election outcomes, there is no incentive for them to be responsible and rational. The aggregate effect of each voter's rational ignorance is that democratic leaders will be elected irrationally. See more on this later. As evidence of this, note that democratic leaders have bankrupted their countries into the ground without producing any notable benefits as a result [17]. Con tries to cherry pick a small number of bad “monarchs” (including the democratically elected Hitler) but I can cite bad presidents all day just as easily [18].CA3. Democracy and War InvolvementCon admits that the correlation between democracy and peacefulness is tenuous at best. The fact that modern democracies do not often go to war is better explained by their economic ties and possession of nuclear weapons[19]. The United States has overthrown democracies to achieve foreign policy objectives, and just because it uses its massive military against people ruled by dictators doesn't make it less warlike [20,21]. Recall also that military spending has increased 2-4 times under democracy [22].CA4. The Public SphereCon's extensive comparison of the socially regressive Ayatollah regime to Western democracies violates the rule of ceteris paribus assumptions. Of course conservative, theocratic governments will be less tolerant of religious blasphemy than liberal, secular governments. Democracies still extensively censor and control freedom of speech: bans on violent movies and video games and pornography are common [23,24,25]. Democracies also enforce ubiquitous intellectual property laws that seldom existed under monarchy and were much less intrusive when they did, a hindrance to public access to information if there ever was one. Democracies also first started to implement extensive propaganda campaigns, which began most notably during World War I [26]. As the saying goes, there is no need to take the books off the selves if no one reads them. Democracies control popular opinion and public discourse just as well or better than monarchies ever did.General Critiques:1. SourcesCon does not cite his facts very well and often cites irrelevant sources to back up his contentions (example: citing the Constitution to defend social contract theory when it's actually a random document not on the topic). As a result, he makes numerous factual errors, for instance by asserting that, “[a]s the Papal succession has shown, the virtue of the state under a monarch is usually at the whimsical decision making of the leader,” while we know that the Pope is elected by the College of Cardinals and this argument does not apply at all [27]. There is no reason to take any of his historical references seriously, and indeed I could just flatly deny them for lack of documentation. I will contrast this with my sources in the final round.2. Ceteris ParibusCon basically ignores the ceteris paribus rule by using impoverished, Third World dictatorships (not based on tradition or inheritance and indeed ever on the verge of collapse) with wealthy, Western democracies. This would be like comparing England under Elizabeth to Athens and noting the superior technology achieved under monarchy [28,29]. By contrast, I compared the same countries to themselves following the transition from democracy to monarchy. This actually goes in Con's favor because, ceteris paribus, we would expect society to advance as time goes on.Further Critique of Democracy:CA5. The Myth of the Rational VoterBecause of the scale of elections, the odds that any voter will influence their outcome is very low [30]. Because of this, the individual's vote is low stakes, and he does not have an incentive to put much effort into making an informed decision when his vote will certainly not influence the result. However, the same incentives apply to everyone, so no one will vote rationally [31]. The irrational votes do not cancel each other out; people will tend to systematically believe things that are easy to believe [32]. For instance, it is easy to believe that Obama is not a US citizen, that protection from foreign companies benefits Americans, or that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons because these things might validate an opinion or worldview. Many people believe these assertions even though they have been widely refuted, and they vote based on their believes [33,34,35]. People also show willingness to electe officials who believe in nonsense like Creationism or support patently evil policies, such as the persecution of homosexuals [36,37]. As a result of the failure of the system, many people have become so apathetic that countries like Australia have had to make voting compulsory [38]. It seems even the people aren't interested in having democracy.Sources:http://tinyurl.com...