The Issue With The ‘Consensus’ Concept
I just found this reply to this post on democracy I wrote a while ago, and I'd like to address some of the concepts and suggestions proposed within the post briefly.
When I challenge majority democracy, many people leap to this idea that the issue is that the arbitrary number of people who must agree with the policy is simply too low. If we move to 50%, 80% or 99% then we will have a far better set of rules, but the 'consensus' model is fundamentally flawed from the start.
Are We Headed For An Information Blackout?
When considering the characteristics of a free country, it usually doesn't take very long until we stumble upon the 'free press', but very few of us actually think about what makes a free press work, we just assume that it means that the press can give us the information which is in our interests, and hold government to account.
Several mechanisms exist to ensure that the press is capable of doing this: freedom of expression, of course, so that the press can print the stories which the government doesn't want it to; minimal regulation, to prevent certain viewpoints being shut down (we have regulations in TV media which create a very un-free press, but Fleet Street is usually exempt from this) and of course the right for journalists to protect their sources.
Why is that so important? Well, let's imagine a world where government employees just don't talk to the media because they fear ending up in prison even if what they're exposing is in the public interest. Even in today's world (a relatively free country), we would never have found out about the Millie Dowler phone hacking case, we would probably never have found out about prison corruption, you can see how this allows the government to sweep its own failings under the rug quite easily.
The “You’re Voting To Make The Poor Poorer” Fallacy
One of the devices the left like to use in debate is emotional blackmail. Instead of addressing your point, they will simply try to assert that you are immoral or that you are deliberately voting for / pushing morally reprehensible policies without truly considering the context within which policies need to be made. This is one of a number of techniques the left use to shut down debate which they don't want to partake in.
To give an example, let's say you're talking about pushing a campaign to lower the local housing allowance of housing benefit (which, frankly, is pretty high in some areas of the country - £250 a week for a 1 bedroom property). Instead of trying to reason with you about why the campaign is wrong (maybe it would make it harder to find affordable housing for recipients), nine times out of ten they will just try to shut down the debate with the following (or a variant thereof):
"You just want to give more to the rich bankers and take away from the poor!"
Of course, there are several issues with this statement. First of all, it's backwards, as we're not giving anything to the bankers or taking anything away from the poor. The natural state without government would be that the poor get nothing from the state, and the banker gives nothing to the state, therefore we are still suggesting taking away from the rich and giving to the poor, but "you just want to take away less from the bankers and give less to the poor, but still enough to rent a house without going to work" doesn't sound quite as powerful, does it?
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