How about basing our institutions and our opinions on reality? Now, that would be something new, wouldn't it? We could start with notions like, "all people work in their own self interest"--even politicians and bureaucrats. A corollary of that might be "people adjust their behavior to take the easiest path." And another, "power corrupts," along with, "the worst get on top." How about, "tax dollars are the easiest dollars to spend"? Here's one: "for most people, principles go out the door at the first sign of inconvenience." Here is another: "there are no rights, but only will." And another: "taxes are theft." And another: "laws are based on, and depend on, violence." And another: "people naturally care to a great extent, what their fellows think of them."

Of course there is something very wrong with unlimited democracies. There is simply no justification for the majority of the population in a country imposing its will on everyone. The idea is completely misguided. Why on earth should a great number of people have the authority to force a small number to obey them? There is no argument anywhere in the history of political philosophy and theory that would make out the case for this? If it were a valid point, it would imply that a large number of thugs somehow have the right to subdue other people to serve them. The famous example of the lynch mob that hangs an accused person make the point without difficulty. Expanding the will of vicious people doesn’t make it virtuous. And even if what the larger group wants is actually virtuous, forcing it on others is still not justified since they would have to make the free choice to be virtuous. Human virtue must be a matter of free choice. Only in self-defense may force be applied to others!

Perhaps, this is the more reason why Politicians will tell you when they win elections they must take all, everything in terms of privileges and kick backs. Which is why we cannot kid ourselves with the thinking that the mentality of winner takes all will be cured by handshakes, photo opportunities with the President whilst drinking tea and munching tea bread embedded with salad and sardine. If we want to adequately spread the gains and losses from democracy we must by all means deepen the decentralization of power and resources. We can make people less disgruntled only when we deepen the decentralization concept, when locals begin to rely less on the patronizing centre and enjoy what they create. I have failed to understand why this country has water bodies in all ten regions, yet we all have to rely on the centre to provide us good drinking water, which is at most erratic in supply. The same could be said of the establishment of development authorities. Development does not come about by erecting bureaucracies. They come about when people’s aspirations are respected, when their properties, even shacks are identified by the economy, are free to speak trade and buy their own health care.

In all of the above the one major question is and who caused this? After all don’t we deserve the governments we vote for?

Well, what worries me most is the constitutional frame work that allows such recklessness to occur. With a powerful executive presidency, whimsical and capricious decisions are often aided by a largely moribund majority in parliament that toes the line even when red flags are on the high way.

Democracy can be defined in the “narrow” and “broad” sense, but complementarily, both give a deeper understanding of the concept. Narrowly, democracy is defined as majority rule, which is a system of governance where the people choose their leaders through electioneering. This is also known as electoral democracy and it shows how mandate or power is derived. Ideally and broadly, a true democracy should encompass both electoral democracy and liberal democracy.

A Liberal democracy according to the online library, Wikipedia, is a form of government characterized by fair, free, and competitive elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the protection of human rights and civil liberties for all persons.

It is not only that the two candidates share much more in common with one another than they do with my vision of a free society; both candidates offer very little for the principled folks in their own party. I would think even a progressive or conservative would find it almost impossible to support either side. On issues like immigration, abortion, trade, taxes, deficit spending, and healthcare, for better or worse, the two politicians have gravitated toward a policy of status quo interventionism.

I have come across various discussions of democracy and its discontents lately. Leaving aside the “Worst system, except for all of the others…” defense, I think that before we critique or defend democracy it’s worth asking what we mean by democracy. Or, more specifically, what do we mean when we say that one system is more democratic than another?

Whatever the official ideology of democracy, most people’s emotional framing of their relationship to the state is colored by their childhood socialization in relation to parental authority. Developmental psychologists tell us that children are actually socialized to view government as an extension of parental authority. The President is first viewed as a sort of Mommy or Daddy, with the American people as the family. Gradually actors like Congress, the courts, and so forth enter the picture — at first understood as simply “helpers” to the President, and only later as constitutional checks to presidential authority. But the aura of parental authority persists, on a subliminal level, even then.

Of course, it’s no surprise that U.S. officials try their best to convince Americans that democracy is freedom. If Americans are convinced that democracy is freedom, then they’ll be satisfied with the fact that there is an electoral process. They might even participate in it by voting, making them feel even more free. The idea is that Americans will look on the United States as a free country because there are elections, even as public officials assume the power to seize people, torture them, incarcerate them indefinitely without trial, or execute them with a kangaroo tribunal rather than after a legitimate jury trial — i.e., the same powers wielded by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Cuba, and other non-democratic dictatorships around the world.

Like other religions, it relies as much on faith as on reason. African decolonization, carried out on a democratic model, repeatedly took the form of one man, one vote, once. Its results included some of the bloodiest conflicts of the postwar world. In several different countries, casualties were in at least the hundreds of thousands—worse, I think, than anything in colonial Africa since Leopold's Congo atrocities. That history should remind the supporters of democracy that it is a means, not an end, hence not always and everywhere an unambiguously good thing.

If you only like the term democracy because you want to enforce your will on others fewer in number or just less empowered, you’ll continually find yourself cutting deals with entrenched powers over whose numbers matter. If you want real democracy — power vested in the people — you should be interested in anarchism.

How dare these people impose their idea of "illicit" on anyone else? Who are they, anyway? And what about the innumerable petty tyrannies of government regulations – issuing completely unjustly from federal, state, county, to municipal rulers? All these are forms of prior restraint, imposing penalties, at times jail sentences, on people who have no committed any violations of any rights but merely are deemed by bureaucrats and their bosses, politicians, capable of doing so! How is that for justice – penalizing people because they might become criminals? That policy would have us all in prison.