Stupid, Ignorant Or Biased?

by Walter E. Williams - September 19th, 2007 - Townhall.com

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's closest adviser and architect of the New Deal, Harry Hopkins, advised, "Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect, because the people are too damn dumb to know the difference."

Anyone want to know why democracy and socialism are the two greatest threats to freedom that have ever existed? Walter Williams talks about one of those threats and the explanations for it offered by a brilliant scholar, Professor Bryan Caplan. It starts with the irrational explanation for the Democrat Party's embracing of socialism summed up in Harry Hopkins cynical strategy of three generations ago.

I have any number of friends who recoil in surprise when I call democracy a threat to freedom. However it is time for those who understand the growing burden of our tyrannical government to start demanding that we undo some of the socialist practices that democracy has embraced. "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich A. Hayek has clearly explained the tyranny of socialism. However we must start to be as appalled by the greed of democracy as we are appalled at the tyranny of socialism. They work together to lead to ever greater tyranny as each generation passes. Professor Caplan's book lists the false ideas that support the greedy practices of democracy (practices which are embraced by liberals without a tinge of guilt at the evil consequences).

It is interesting that the least democratic of our institutions, the oppressive unelected courts, are the most aggressive advocates demanding the spread of democracy and thus do the most to subvert freedom. I sometimes wonder whether that is irony or just hypocrisy. I also wonder whether any of our intelligent and learned legal scholars have ever read the history that so frightened our founders and kept them away from embracing democracy. Democratic election of a Republic's officials was not intended to embrace democracy itself. The closer we get to a pure democracy, the more evil our government becomes.