<Publius is neither scoffing nor saying it doesn't happen. I have personally seen both situations and the details are part of my personal experiences. My problem here is why you and Tom blame government for this? How about blaming the corrupt businessmen? How about blaming yourself, for allowing what you perceive as being an evil to exist. Did you do anything about either of the cases you post?

The argument was that the way the system is set up tends to SELECT for corrupt businessmen and politicians. The honest and/or scrupulous ones get weeded out early in the game.

The very governments you object to and condem are you. In the words of Walt Kelly in Pogo, "we have met the enemy, and he is us." The 87,000 various governments in this country are you, your neighbors, and fellow citizens. To the extent governments are corrupt, then you are corrupt.



You are a part of the problem in this equation or part of the problem. To sit back and just bitch and moan over how bad "goverment" is, is the same as voting for the activity you object to.



I like to think I'm doing more than just bitching, but you make a good point. In a democracy, people get the kind of government they want, or at least that they think they want. Even the worst tyrannies have often started out being welcomed by the people who thought they could somehow benefit from such a system, or that it would be better than whatever they had.

So step one is to try and convince the citizens of our country that there Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, and that a system which largely consists of people using the vote to exert control over the lives and property of their fellow citizens needs reworking at some basic level.

I'm not too optimistic about this. I can't even convince liberals here of this problem, and you guys are the smart ones. Our system of government was supposed to be a democracy strictly limited by a rigid structure and a Constitution. In practice, it is evolving into a pure democracy, where the "will of some people" overrides all moral and other limitations. This may not be reversible through normal political channels (ref. Declaration of Independence.)

Someone who thinks that they have a right to keep me from smoking (I don't, by the way. Never have.) just in case some smoke drifts into their little pink lungs and causes some damage, and yet thinks they have a perfect right to inflict huge damages on me by tearing half of my income away from me by armed force (among many other things), needs to do some serious rethinking about the basic concept of freedom from being harmed by their fellow citizens.

* * *

What system would really be best is problematical. I'm still thinking about this myself. There are some libertarians who make a good case that even democracy is too oppressive over individual rights, and that the idea of trying to find a replacement "system" shows that we are still not thinking far enough out of the box. L. Neil Smith has some good stuff at his site, particularly this bunch of essays.

I'm currently reading his latest book, "The American Zone," the first direct sequel to "The Probability Broach." Good stuff, and some ideas that make you think.