Yee haw! That's right, Rush is on the radio in the mornings on Saturday, isn't he? Really gets the old blood boiling, eh?

The question I was examining was whether conservatives are for or against democracy. In five paragraphs of stirring rhetoric I'm pretty sure you answered "against", because of the inequities you perceive. Chief among these is that those with less money use the power of government--taxation--to transfer wealth* to themselves from those with more money.

(*--I'm not sure that the subsistence amounts of welfare could accurately be characterized as "wealth"; perhaps it's more accurate to say "enforced charity"?)

The obvious solution you see is to take away the vote from people with less money so that they can't force charity from those with more money. In an ideal world, political power would be proportional to wealth; you could buy votes openly and honestly.

Let's examine the consequences.

One positive consequence would be to throw hordes of lobbyists and lawyers out of work. Hallelujah! Cutting out the middlemen will certainly make the government respond more efficiently to the needs of business.

And respond it will. The wealthier (corporations and individuals) will naturally want the government to protect their wealth. They're as protective of their self-interest as those poor former voters. You'd hardly expect antitrust prosecutions under this regime; certainly no "frivolous" lawsuits--consumers will damn well be satisfied with what they get.

It wouldn't happen overnight. It would accrete a little at a time, law by law...in exactly the same way that the present situation came about. Wealth being proportional to influence, initial small differentials in wealth will be leveraged by the new differentials in political power.

The present relatively heterogenous business environment will sort itself out into a relative handful of giant corporations. Over time, as government antitrust enforcement declines, as laws against unfair business practices are repealed, as government in general finally "gets off the back of business", the smaller enterprises will be forced to merge or die.

On day one, Microsoft owns everything made of bits by virtue of its initial wealth.

As there become fewer companies in the world, by definition there become fewer employers. People's choices for employment become fewer and employers have more power to dictate terms. Some employers may end up holding a monopoly on certain kinds of employment. The semiconductor industry today is close to that point, as there are only a handful of employers in the world who hire ion lithography experts and chip designers and ASIC engineers.

But wait, there's more: Some of the most economically powerful entities in America are multinationals, or are dominated by internationals; foreign individuals own shares of American companies. Foreign businesses pay taxes on operations in America, so they, of course, deserve some say in how those taxes are spent. Tariffs are bad for business; and businesses should be able to operate wherever in the world costs are lowest.

Foreigners get a piece of the action, American multinationals tie American political interests to foreign interests, and American workers are put on an equal footing with workers in third-world countries who get by on a dollar a day. Cause darn it, that's the most efficient way to do it under democratic capitalism.

Welcome to the New World Order, Tom.

I have to admit that I've often doubted the wisdom of democracy as judged by its results, about 49.99999999% of the time, and took some comfort in Winston Churchill's words on the subject.

Democracy can be summed up as "you win some, you lose some". Different implementations of democracy produce different results, with unique inequities, but the inequities are always there. If you try to stack the deck, you increase the ratio of losers to winners. 50% is about as good as it gets.

The one advantage I see to the universal variation on democracy (the "pure stuff") is that makes government responsible to the broadest range of people, giving them more power to redress the inequities. As a system, it has the maximum ability to correct its own errors. As the voting franchise shrinks, the system loses its ability to counter excesses, and drifts into greater inequity, overall, than you were trying to fix.

So I'd paraphrase Winston: Universal democracy is the worst form of democracy...[puff...puff]...except for all the rest.

I'm taking a fundamentally conservative point of view: The system we have, based on maximal participation in democracy, is the safest system anybody's thought of so far. I don't want conservatives to change it into an oligarchy.

Liberals don't like intellectual diversity, as witness their treatment of conservative minorities. Conservatives in this country are routinely abused, slandered, and, as you say, "dismissed as stupid and uninformed," particularly in the media and in the academic environment.

Oh, wow, Tom, I wish I'd known that you conservatives have been victimized so brutally! That really triggers the liberal impulses buried deep inside, and oh man, my heart just bleeds for you!

C'mon Tom, seriously, I thought conservatives were stoic and strong, anchors of iron determination and will. I'm disillusioned...you sound like a, well, like a liberal, fer hevvinsake. You poor babies.

--Robert