Are Freedom and Democracy Incompatible? Peter Thiel thinks so

Peter Thiel is the creator of PayPal, also the first major investor in Facebook and he sits on the Facebook board.

Peter Thiel
Wikipedia

Peter Thiel wrote, on April 13, 2009, in the Libertarian 'Cato Unbound' blog, “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In the same article, he also wrote, "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron. (emphasis mine) Wikipedia

How does Thiel define "freedom"?

"I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives”   Peter Thiel - The Education of a Libertarian

Thiel thinks his freedom is incompatible with democracy. How is democracy normally defined?

democracy ‎(plural democracies)

1. (uncountable) Rule by the people, especially as a form of government; either directly or through elected representatives (representative democracy).  
2. (countable, government) A government under the direct or representative rule of the people of its jurisdiction.  
3. (uncountable) Belief in political freedom and equality; the "spirit of democracy".

"Democracy" then, means the rule of the "demos". Who are the "demos"?

demos ‎(plural demoi)

1. (political science) The common populace of a state, the people. Wiktiionary

Where and how is Democracy incompatible with Peter Thiel's freedom?

It's all quite simple, let Bernie Sanders explain:

This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change.(...) We need to end the international scandal in which large corporations and the wealthy avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes to their national governments. Bernie Sanders - New York Times

Where is Thiel-style freedom leading?

McAfee, associate director of the MIT Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management, (...)despite his obvious enthusiasm for the technologies,  doesn’t see the recently vanished jobs coming back. The pressure on employment and the resulting inequality will only get worse, he suggests, as digital technologies—fueled with “enough computing power, data, and geeks”—continue their exponential advances over the next several decades. “I would like to be wrong,” he says, “but when all these science-fiction technologies are deployed, what will we need all the people for?” (emphasis mine) MIT Technology Review Magazine

Obviously. from Peter Thiel's personal point of view, democracy and his freedom are incompatible.

In Thiel's defense we should be grateful for his forthrightness, because Peter Thiel is rather innocent in his sincerity. The crafty Koch Brothers, for example, would never come right out and express themselves so frankly, but everything they actually do expresses the same view of democracy as Thiel's.

And they are not just sitting on their hands, they are up and doing something about it.

The House approved a bill Tuesday that would bar the IRS from collecting the names of donors to tax-exempt groups, prompting warnings from campaign-finance watchdogs that it could lead to foreign interests illegally infiltrating American elections. USA Today  

USA Today’s Fredreka Schouten reported that the bill is openly supported by Charles Koch, the older of the two “Koch Brothers,” fossil fuel billionaires whose deep pockets hold a notoriously outsized influence on American politics. Kit O'Connell - Mint Press

This is nothing new. The democratic state, (government of the people, by the people, for the people) has always been the only possible defense of "the People" facing the powerful, who wish to dominate and exploit them.

Again, knowing who the Thiels and the Kochs of this world are, who are "the People"?

The mass of a community as distinguished from a special class (elite); the commonalty; the populace; the vulgar; the common crowd; the citizens. Wiktionary

How long has this struggle between the "Thiels and Kochs" and "the People" been going on?

Aesop: A Lion used to prowl about a field in which Four Oxen used to dwell. Many a time he tried to attack them; but whenever he came near they turned their tails to one another, so that whichever way he approached them he was met by the horns of one of them. At last, however, they fell a-quarreling among themselves, and each went off to pasture alone in a separate corner of the field. Then the Lion attacked them one by one and soon made an end of all four. Moral: United we stand, divided we fall.

This struggle is nothing new and it has no end. DS

Freedom of Speech

David Seaton's News Links

The United States of America has a radical definition of freedom of speech. Oliver Wendell Holmes (seen at the right) defined its limits as "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater".

Today's Supreme Court even gives corporations the right to corrupt the American political system, under the protection of the First Amendment.

Now that we have defined "freedom", let us define "polite discourse".

Let us use the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans as an example:

If someone were to affirm that the Dalai Lama and the entire Tibetan exile movement were abject tools of the CIA, whose purpose was merely to destabilize the People's Republic of China, this would simply be a political opinion, one whose merits could be discussed, even heatedly, without crossing any special frontier of "polite discourse".

If someone were to affirm that they thought the Tibetan custom of drinking tea mixed with Yak butter was disgusting, this would simply be a statement of personal taste and à chacun son goût.

However, if someone were to state (I don't) that Tibetans were a benighted, superstitious pack of idolaters, whose religious services resembled nothing so much as one long belch and whose women never bathed in their whole lives, they would be crossing into the terrain of gross racial stereotyping, and way outside polite discourse.

What then could be considered hate speech?

I would say that advocating that Tibetans should be lined up and shot, Norwegian fashion, would  fit "hate speech" and be over the line of Justice Holmes' limits of "free speech".

As far as I am concerned those are the limits.

I am open to suggestions, but for B*ddha's sake, please limit your comments to Tibetans. DS

Is "freedom" just another word for nothing left to lose?

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There is a world, a universe, of pain in the following quote from the Financial Times:

If you want something to get angry about, I wouldn’t look at tuition fees. I’d look at a little graph produced by Leon Feinstein of the Institute for Education, which shows tests of cognitive development given to almost 2,500 children at the age of 22 months, 42 months, five years and 10 years. The very brightest 22-month-old working-class kids were inexorably overhauled by the very dimmest children of professional or managerial parents – apparently by the age of about seven, and emphatically by the age of 10. -  Financial Times

If this is true about Great Britain, which still has some scraps of its once fine welfare state intact, it is surely doubly or triply true of the United States of America. Has a study similar to Leon Feinstein's  even been done in America yet? I imagine so, studies like Feinstein's seem to roll off of America's back like water off a duck.

Just the other day a judge in Virginia declared president Obama's minimalist health care bill, "unconstitutional", meaning that millions of Americans are to be condemned to pain and early death, because of a document written over two hundred years ago by an assembly of wealthy men living on land stolen from the Indians (all of them) worked for them by African slaves (many of them). These men gave a lot of thought to "freedom", but I would argue that their idea of freedom was an aristocratic one, a worship of the sacred "individual" similar to the slave-based economy that fostered the philosophy of ancient Greece. Such individualism is postulated on a great mass of invisible "half-people", who may, as is often the case in America today, not even be needed or fitted for productive work, not even recruits for Marx's "reserve army of labor".

We are talking about human beings with one life to live, whose potential to contribute, to be useful to themselves and to society is being thrown, flushed, away. Common sense and common decency reel from this thought.

In America, when we talk about poor education for poor children, we may quite possibly be talking about physical hunger too. Conservative estimates put the figure at about 13 million hungry children in the USA. Here is how "Bread for the World" breaks it down:

--36.3 million people--including 13 million children--live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents more than one in ten 0households in the United States (11.2 percent). This is an increase of 1.4 million, from 34.9, million in 2002.

--3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger. Some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. 9.6 million people, including 3 million children, live in these homes.

--7.7 percent of U.S. households are at risk of hunger. Members of these households have lower quality diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they cannot always afford the food they need. 26.6 million people, including 10.3 million children, live in these homes.

One blogger confronted with these statistics, did a little math and wrote the following:

Think about this. Recently 20 billion dollars was given to Bank of America to bail them out. With that amount every hungry child in America could eat for a year

The judge in Virginia that struck down the gelded health plan would probably call that "socialist demagoguery". Maybe it is: I'm cool with that.

Many think that nothing will happen, that America' poor of today are to degraded to react. An "anonymous" reader wrote this in response to a recent post of mine, speculating about the possibility of civil strife similar to Europe's in the USA:

It's hard for me to imagine the unemployed rebelling. It's not that people are necessarily apathetic, but they're unarmed (I mean in things like useful education, intelligent political discourse) and bombarded with jingoism and bread and circuses nonsense. And beyond the deficit in political awareness, there are the practical problems of always being cold and tired and sick and having all your energies taken up with just getting by.

I would reply that many of those soon to be out of  a job, out of their homes, with no savings, or their saving eaten up, and soon to be destitute are "armed" with an education and even armed without quotation marks and that history shows that peoples in this world even more brutalized, hungry, alienated and empty handed than today's Americans, have risen up before and rebelled. DS

Giving freedom a bad name

David Seaton's News Links
When you are confronted by events like the Virginia Tech massacre and the universal broadcasting of the killer's delirious "manifesto", followed by the massive conservative defense of the convenience of students carrying concealed firearms... and then you read this article from the McClatchy Newspapers about growing "severe" poverty in the world's wealthiest country, then, like a puppy having its nose rubbed in its mess, you are forced to confront Lenin's terrible question: "Freedom - yes, but for whom? To do what?"

Certainly if "freedom", as interpreted by America's conservatives and libertarian fundamentalists, finally comes to stand for insanity, violent death and poverty, more and more people all over the world, but eventually even in America itself, will be ready to "make other plans" and there will never be a lack of people to "help" them. We are witnessing the baby of liberty being thrown out with the bathwater of freedom. DS

U.S. economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty - McClatchy Newspapers
Abstract: The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen. A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year. The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas. The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years. These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation's 37 million poor people into deep poverty - the highest rate since at least 1975. The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily over the last three decades. But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown "more than any other segment of the population," according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.(...) Over the last two decades, America has had the highest or near-highest poverty rates for children, individual adults and families among 31 developed countries, according to the Luxembourg Income Study, a 23-year project that compares poverty and income data from 31 industrial nations. "It's shameful," said Timothy Smeeding, the former director of the study and the current head of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University. "We've been the worst performer every year since we've been doing this study." With the exception of Mexico and Russia, the U.S. devotes the smallest portion of its gross domestic product to federal anti-poverty programs, and those programs are among the least effective at reducing poverty, the study found. Again, only Russia and Mexico do worse jobs. One in three Americans will experience a full year of extreme poverty at some point in his or her adult life, according to long-term research by Mark Rank, a professor of social welfare at the Washington University in St. Louis. An estimated 58 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 75 will spend at least a year in poverty, Rank said. Two of three will use a public assistance program between ages 20 and 65, and 40 percent will do so for five years or more. These estimates apply only to non-immigrants. If illegal immigrants were factored in, the numbers would be worse, Rank said. "It would appear that for most Americans the question is no longer if, but rather when, they will experience poverty. In short, poverty has become a routine and unfortunate part of the American life course," Rank wrote in a recent study. "Whether these patterns will continue throughout the first decade of 2000 and beyond is difficult to say ... but there is little reason to think that this trend will reverse itself any time soon." READ IT ALL