Demokrasi hakkında...

Uzun bir süredir Alan Greenspan'ın The Age of Turbulence kitabını okumaya çalışıyorum. Kitap hakkında ileride uzun bir posta yayınlayacağım ama (muhtemelen onu iyipara'ya koyarım) kitabın bir yerindeki alıntıyı yapmak istiyorum:

Sayfa 345:
Economic populism is presumed to be an extension of democracy to economics. It is not. Small-d democrats support a form of government in which the majority rules on all public issues, but never in contravention of the basic rights of individuals. In such societies, the rights of minorities are protected from the majority. We have chosen to grant to the majority the right to determine all public policy issues that do not infringe on individual rights.*



Democracy is a messy process, and it certainly is not always the most efficient form of government. Yet I agree with Winston Churchill's quip: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." For better or worse, we have no choice but to assume that people acting freely will ultimately make the right decisions on how to govern themselves. If the
majority makes the wrong decisions, there will be adverse consequences—even, in the end, civil chaos.



Populism tied to individual rights is what most people call liberal Democracy. "Economic populism" as used by most economists, however, refers
implicitly to a democracy in which the "individual rights" qualifier is largely
missing. Unqualified democracy where 51 percent of the people can legally
do away with the rights of the remaining 49 percent, leads to tyranny+ The
term then becomes pejorative when applied to the likes of Peron, who to
most historians is largely responsible for Argentina's long economic decline
after World War II. Argentina is still laboring under that legacy.



The battle for capitalism is never won. Latin America demonstrates
this perhaps more clearly than any other region. Income concentration and
a landed gentry with roots in sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese
conquests still foster deep and festering resentments. Capitalism in Latin
America is still a struggle at best.



*We may require supermajorities to implement certain laws. For example, in the United
States, only a supermajority may override a presidential veto—but it was
majorities in the assemblies of the thirteen original states that ratified
the Constitution, choosing to be governed in that manner.



+Many of our Founding Fathers feared that American majority rule without the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America—our Bill of Rights—would be tyranny.