One man, no votes... or maybe two

Plato was right thousands of years ago when he pointed out that democracy has some huge problems as a general governing system. Many his of reasons are not sound, but less democracy would help America immesurably.

I have two central problems with democracy. First, people are willing to accept anything as long as they feel (as opposed to think) that they have had a say in the decision making. Freedom is much easier to take away when the soccer moms feel empowered. We are significantly less free than were the subjects of Europe during the Age of Kings. The highest tax rates at that time rarely reached ten percent. Now, many Americans pay one-third of their income to our rulers. Those kind of taxes would have caused most peasants to chop the head off the their local duke. When was the last time the great unwashed took a pitchfork brigade to the state capital to stop property tax boosts? Citizens are much more jealous of their freedom under a sovereign ruler.

Democracy also leads to lowest common denomenator policies. Simply put, and you'll either agree with me or not, the opinion of the majority of plebes is not as legitimate as previous forms of governance. When a king, who technically owned the country, made a pronouncement, he was setting policies of how things are done on his own land. Now, a plurality (not even always a majority) of citizens tell everyone how to do things on their own property. More importantly, when monarchs were crowned by popes and in turn local aristocrats were knighted by those monarchs, authority was subordinated to Holy Mother Church, the truest source of legitimacy there ever will be. These situations provide much more governmental legitimacy than our current system. The Church was also a true "check and balance" over earthly powers, unlike our government, where the three branches collude more than they check.

We need less democracy and more aristocracy. I'll touch on these topics in later posts, but we need to restrict the suffrage of certain groups, like state employees, and maybe give two votes to other constituencies, like priests and homeowners. And ideally, the president should be resubordinated to the Pontiff, at least in ceremony.