[quote]Agressive Napkin wrote:
I did not read the thread, but in my defense I have read the Federalist papers.
We are a Democratic REPUBLIC
I don’t understand why people are so enamored with the term Democracy.
I don’t know if this relates to the thread in any meaningful way.[/quote]
Very much so! - but we were just speaking in the general classical term for the sake of discussion rather than in the specific distinguishing of governmental type.
Democracies are failing because people are completely retarded. They don’t seek out truthful information, they don’t base judgement on facts and logic (only on pure emotion), and they certainly have a sense of extreme entitlement. As for personal responsibility, I won’t even go there.
For Democracy to work, you need to have a voter base that is educated and rational.
before we can understand why should we not try to understand the question.
what is the criterias for a functioning democracy?, and what is the criteria for a failed democracy?
democracy meens “people power” or “the rule of the people”. So the first criteria, is that the people does have the power for a democracy to be a democracy. does the people rule the western societys?
I see folks here talk about economic concerns, thats fair enough. whats the point of a society who cant feed, house and cloth its people, wich is basicly the purpose of society. So the second criteria is that the democratic society is able to sustain a level of production thats benefits all. Are the western societys able to provide needed material goods to all of its members?
And last: individual freedom. any one can agree that all forms of societys that denies its members basics freedoms are bad or failed societys. such freedoms as freedom of life( there are no point to form a society wich kills you ), freedom of speech, beliefe and organisation ( a democracy can not offcourse be a real democracy if some entity denies you to do political actions ). So does the western democracys denie us this freedoms?
[quote]PAINTRAINDave wrote:
Guys this wasn’t my intention with this thread. I wanted to start a discussion on whether democracies are inherently flawed, and discuss ideas in which to improve western democracies in all countries regardless of location on the political spectrum. Any thoughts?[/quote]
Well yes, democracies are inherently flawed and until recently everyone knew that which is why noone tried to implement democracy anywhere.
The US and the European nations were meant to be democractic republics but apparently the democratic element was to strong and will destroy their systems.
[quote]IrishSteel wrote:
And here is where you will lose the battle, my little socialist, - NAME the EXACT REGUALTION that was LOOSENED that resulted in this current state? If what you say it true, this should be an absolute no-brainer.
You can even choose to do so nationally (US) or globally - you pick . . .
and the clock starts now . . .[/quote]
Gramm- Blilely - Leach Act of 1999 which repealed the Glass Steagal Act of 1933 being. This broke down the barriers between commercial and investment banks and allowed risk to spread through the financial system. This was the start, but the real cause was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 which removed derivatives such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s) from being regulated like other futures contracts. This allowed wall street to create, with the complicity of dishonest ratings agencies toxic assets which were sold around the world which when revealed to be worthless, led to the financial crisis. Clock now ticks for you…
Aww, someone has done a little research finally - thanks Sambo!
Ok, let’s start with a little history lesson for the non-researchers among us . . .
Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, the first major injection of heavy government regulation into the financial markets after the establishment of the Federal Reserve, in a reaction to the market crash of 1929, which at the time was blamed on too much speculation. Senator Glass was a former treasury secretary and the founder of the Federal Reserve System established in 1913 - an system that deserves its own discussion thread. Congressman Steagall was chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee. Steagall initially supported the legislation because an amendment was added to provide bank deposit insurance for the very first time. Later, he would try to repeal the GSA claiming it was an overreaction to the crisis.
At the time what was considered “overzealous” or “greedy” commercial bank involvement in stock market investment, was deemed to be the main cause of the financial crash. In the decades since, many additional reasons have come to light, but that again calls for its own discussion thread.
Banks were actually investing their own assets but they were also buying stocks and reselling them to the public, thus increasing their risk exposure exponentially. So, the wise “social engineers” decided to save the public from the greed of the bankers by separating banking and investing into two separate services. - ok, that was the intent - what was the actual law?
GSA gave banks 1 year to decide if they would be a commercial or investment bank and set up regulatory firewalls between the two distinct types of activities. The purpose for the division was to prevent banks from using depositor’s funds to cover losses experienced through failed underwriting. - ok, that was the act, what happened next?
Apparently the government thought this regulation was not enough - so in 1956, they passed the Bank Holding Company Act, separating banking from insurance - banks could sell insurance but they could not be the underwriting agency. Ok, so was all of this regulation necessary? Not necessarily, the case can be argued effectively that narrowing the types of products banks were allowed to participate in exposed them to greater risks by not allowing them to have alternative sources of revenue to shoulder any losses in a particular market. Furthermore, a review of the financial markets since GSA shows that it was not capable of stabilizing the financial markets as was it intention.
It was this inability to pervent adverse outcomes in the financial market that lead to the repeal of the GSA with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999.
Now let’s get to your claim that this was the cause of the current financial crisis - you did not specify national or global, but since you focused solely on American legislation it can be concluded that you intended national - unfortunately this is where your claim breaks down.
Bank deregulation in the repeal of GSA had nothing to do with the current crisis in fact, just the opposite is true. There was no crisis in bank investments - there was a crisis in bank lending - the traditional role of commercial banks and the one service line that was the most regulated of all - increased lending regulation caused the problem.
The actual cause for the current economic situation in the US goes back to the sub-prime mortgage loans: here is a link to a WSJ article detailing in part the government’s role through regulation in causing this situation: Peter J. Wallison: Barney Frank, Predatory Lender - WSJ
With government regulation requiring sub-prime mortgages, banks were been put into the impossible situation of loaning to borrowers who could not (and still cannot) repay their loans - as this mountain of bad loans grew (further increased by the Community Reinvestment Act), the risks continue to grow.
As the larger financial houses gained more and more risk, the real trouble began as people began to default on their loans - this created a domino effect. In order to cover the bad loans, the companies had to borrow more money. As they demand for credit grew and liquidity tightened, the amount of money available to cover the losses while still providing operational loans decrease. This was the justification for TARP - buying these toxic assets to remove their effect on the credit markets, but this never actually happened - the money was used for other purposes and the risk then spread internationally as the credit lines continued to tighten.
Then the lack of credit spread into affecting debt financing for global corporations also begins to affect the credit available to finance sovereign debt and now we are where we are today - massive sovereign debt caused by socialists policies unable to be repaid and tight credit lines to continue financing the debts - exactly the same scenario that started the ball rolling in the sub-prime markets all caused by government regulation - not by deregulation
Wow, another wall of text!
OK - your turn
Democracy itself is not flawed. In a democracy the people rule and get what they want. Why is our country failing? Because many of the people have spoken. Many people want no part of running their own lives and so they are handing more control over to the government day after day. The government should pay for their healthcare, the schools should raise their kids, colleges should do more to ensure they go, provide jobs, offer unemployment, take over their mortgages they can no longer afford, pay for the children’s college, and so on from the time they are born until they die.
Nope, not yet. It is simply waking up from being on “sleep mode”. In most prosperous economies of the West, people disengage from politics and do more interesting stuff, like raise families, travel, enjoy careers or go camping. As such, “democracy” becomes a little lazy and quiet, which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing - it becomes this way due to affluence and the improvement of the quality of life.
“Democracy” then becomes the refuge of intense busybodies that swear they can engineer utopia if just given a little more money and power.
But as the quality of life becomes impeded, “democracy” wakes up, and people begin to re-engage to protect the interests put on the chopping block by the busybodies. Most (sane) people still operate on the principle that they should leave their children a better world than they had, and once that sacred principle becomes endangered, they wake up.
And we are seeing it in American politics now.
Democracy isn’t perfect. It maye be slow to act, and sometimes too quick to act. But in the wake of 2008, current events are acting as a “smelling salt” for democracy, and we’ll see how it does once awakened before we can determine whether or not it fails.
And despite our pampered, well-kept communist Ryan P. McCarter - whose comfortable existence and leisure time and access to technoloy was provided by the wealth of somebody else and generated from the largesse of the system he derides as evil - and his claims that we stand at the birth of the “class war” whereby angry masses start taking power from the “burzh-wah” in a Marxist fit, the opposite is occurring: people are wanting to tame Leviathan, not empower it.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Nope, not yet. It is simply waking up from being on “sleep mode”. In most prosperous economies of the West, people disengage from politics and do more interesting stuff, like raise families, travel, enjoy careers or go camping. As such, “democracy” becomes a little lazy and quiet, which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing - it becomes this way due to affluence and the improvement of the quality of life.
“Democracy” then becomes the refuge of intense busybodies that swear they can engineer utopia if just given a little more money and power.
But as the quality of life becomes impeded, “democracy” wakes up, and people begin to re-engage to protect the interests put on the chopping block by the busybodies. Most (sane) people still operate on the principle that they should leave their children a better world than they had, and once that sacred principle becomes endangered, they wake up.
And we are seeing it in American politics now.
Democracy isn’t perfect. It maye be slow to act, and sometimes too quick to act. But in the wake of 2008, current events are acting as a “smelling salt” for democracy, and we’ll see how it does once awakened before we can determine whether or not it fails.
And despite our pampered, well-kept communist Ryan P. McCarter - whose comfortable existence and leisure time and access to technoloy was provided by the wealth of somebody else and generated from the largesse of the system he derides as evil - and his claims that we stand at the birth of the “class war” whereby angry masses start taking power from the “burzh-wah” in a Marxist fit, the opposite is occurring: people are wanting to tame Leviathan, not empower it.[/quote]
This is spot on. People are starting to “wake up” and get involved. Those who could care less about politics are not getting active. You are completely right in that those who remain very active during “lulls” are those who want to radically change the system (create utopias, “equalize”, etc.). Unfortunately, since no one is paying attention during these “lulls”, they are able to do it somewhat.
Irish, you are partially right. While the government did play a role, of there was honesty in the financial system the sub prime meltdown would have probably been a relatively minor glitch in the grand scheme of things. Take a pharmacy as an example: Your average pharmacy is filled with products that if misused can have potentially dangerous or even fatal, yet no one is calling for pharmacies to be shut down.
The reason is that these products are properly labeled. If however someone where to switch the labels around or label everything as a relatively harmless we would have a dangerous situation. The problem isnt that there were bad loans, there are always going to be risky loans that risky investors are willing to take on. The problem was that risky loans were rebranded as top notch securities and sold to average consumers looking for stable investments.
When consumers bought CDO’s they were buying the rights to the payments on the loan, loans which should not have been made in the first place. the logic was that even if payments were not made, house values would increase, so that equity could be used to pay off the debt. Now the companies could have been smart, (or is that cunning?) by avoiding these CDO’s, but they bought them from each other anyway and then leveraged them with credit default swaps.
I am not denying that the govt planted the seed, but it was wall street that watered and cultivated the plant. Gramm-B-L did play a part because if one section of a company fails, it affects the whole company, and even if it were only affecting what would have been commercial banks, it affects investment banks because they would be involved in the resulting CDO’s and CDS’s.
[quote]IrishSteel wrote:
NAME the EXACT REGUALTION that was LOOSENED that resulted in this current state?
and the clock starts now . . .[/quote]
It isn’t his fault that you don’t know anything about finance. Joseph Stiglitz wrote on this subject extensively.
The list goes on…
While it was well written, I have some issues with the sleeper awakening. Not that it’s wrong, but that it’s not really comforting. First off, the progressive activist population doesn’t seem to get much sleep. They’ve done very, very, well in changing the role of government into that of a tool for ‘social justice.’ So much that in a matter of three decades, two entitlement programs alone will devour nearly the entire budget. And today, while people aren’t happy with Obama’s HCR, I don’t get the impression the majority want to see the underlying principle behind it thrown out. Also, I don’t sense any real movement to rethink programs which were already threatening to overwhelm us before HCR made it’s way to reality.
Some do seem to sleep, waking to demand that the brakes be put on. Maybe, even demanding that the car be pulled over while we rethink where we’re going. But quickly, satisfied others have heard their counsel, they fall right back asleep, trusting that those remaining awake have taken their advice to heart. And this seems to happen over, and over. So while the driver and his navigator may put on the brakes, perhaps even stopping for a time, the car is never turned around as the sleepy fella in the back seat has suggested repeatedly. Just a straight undeviating–though haltingly at times–direction down the road. And it doesn’t help that each time the guy in the back seat awakens, the driver has picked up more passengers. Passengers who are staying awake right alongside him, looking foward to getting to whatever is at the end of the road.
Thanks Sambaso! really enjoy a good discussion!
You correctly outline the “collateral” market damage - but the bomb was the original toxic assests, the “seed” as you called it. Without that little gem, nothing else would have occurred. Within normal lending practices (outside the sub-prime market) CDO’s and CDS’ would not have been a problem as the default rate was within accutuarial models and loans were being repaid.
For those, following along, if Sambaso or I use a term/abbreviation you need an explanation for just let us know - this next paragraph is for you, Since I know Sambaso understand the term toxic asset.
A toxic asset can be any loan made by the bank - as long as it is being repaid, it is counted as an asset - the bank expects to fully recoup the lended money with interest. Once a loan is defaulted or in danger of defaulting, it becomes toxic - nominally still an asset but with increased likelihood of becoming a write-off or a loss thus an asset is turned into a liability by virtue of the lendee not repaying the loan.
Sub-prime loans were loans given to people who, under normal lending regulation, could not have possibly ever qualified for the loan to buy that nice new house. The bank was forced into providing such loans (government regulations), but with the guarantee from Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac that the government would cover any risks/losses the lenders were exposed to by FM/FM purchasing those sub-prime loans as bundles from the lending institution. This bundling of sub-prime loans then became a tradeable asset - the finanical firms first bailed out were holding massive amounts of these bundled toxic assets.
Normal lending practices, again, would never have resulted in a crisis because the loans would never have become toxic to the point that these purposefully bad sub-prime loans did - it was a ticking time bomb from day one. As the housing bubble, artificially inflated by these sub-prime government-secured loans, finally burst - the bill came due. Someone has to pay the lenders for the loans made under government direction and this directly dried up the credit lines - no one wanted to buy these toxic assets, so they waited and ticked and ticked until finally the financial institutions either had to take the loss and write them off basically destroying their bottom lines and bankrupting thier investors or pass them off to someone else - that someone else became the Federal government through the TARP bill.
Since Freddie and Fannie had bought all of the sub-prime loans they could - and despite years of warning effectively ignored by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd - and finally, there were too many toxic assests on too many balance sheets and no one was willing to lend anymore money to cover these bad loans - either the free market would be allowed to self-correct and take the hard hit to follow - or we could put it off by lending more money to the financial institutions at risk allowing them to continue operating for a while longer.
Enter TARP and the BAilout and then the risks continue to spread. Now there are even fewer available lines of credit and now corporate debt refinancing and operational business loans becomes a crisis - without business able to access the needed credit lines to operate, the economy slows, tax revenues fall and now the governments are in crisis as well.
They need operational loans too (deficit spending) and well as debt financing, but some are to far overleveraged on debt already (Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy. etc) and now they are faced with the same crisis the businesses are facing - take the hit or borrow more - well, there’s even less money - where will they borrow from? thus the current crisis - who will lend to them knowing the risks. At some point the system has to self-correct, no one is big enough to bailout the world . . .
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Nope, not yet. It is simply waking up from being on “sleep mode”. In most prosperous economies of the West, people disengage from politics and do more interesting stuff, like raise families, travel, enjoy careers or go camping. As such, “democracy” becomes a little lazy and quiet, which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing - it becomes this way due to affluence and the improvement of the quality of life.
“Democracy” then becomes the refuge of intense busybodies that swear they can engineer utopia if just given a little more money and power.
But as the quality of life becomes impeded, “democracy” wakes up, and people begin to re-engage to protect the interests put on the chopping block by the busybodies. Most (sane) people still operate on the principle that they should leave their children a better world than they had, and once that sacred principle becomes endangered, they wake up.
And we are seeing it in American politics now.
Democracy isn’t perfect. It maye be slow to act, and sometimes too quick to act. But in the wake of 2008, current events are acting as a “smelling salt” for democracy, and we’ll see how it does once awakened before we can determine whether or not it fails.
And despite our pampered, well-kept communist Ryan P. McCarter - whose comfortable existence and leisure time and access to technoloy was provided by the wealth of somebody else and generated from the largesse of the system he derides as evil - and his claims that we stand at the birth of the “class war” whereby angry masses start taking power from the “burzh-wah” in a Marxist fit, the opposite is occurring: people are wanting to tame Leviathan, not empower it.[/quote]
Too little, too late.
Look at Greece, they would need to:
Cut spending, non discretionary spending like wages, pensions etc…
Raise taxes
Grow their economy at an unprecedented rate.
In other words, no amount of “the people waking up” will change the basic dynamic of this situation and when Greece falls, major European banks and Anglo-American pension funds will fall too.
And now imagine the same thing happening in America, which is roughly 5 years away I guess.
Na, you cannot vote on reality and the reality is that we already have fallen off the cliff, we just have not hit the ground yet.
[quote]Sloth wrote:
While it was well written, I have some issues with the sleeper awakening. Not that it’s wrong, but that it’s not really comforting. First off, the progressive activist population doesn’t seem to get much sleep. They’ve done very, very, well in changing the role of government into that of a tool for ‘social justice.’ So much that in a matter of three decades, two entitlement programs alone will devour nearly the entire budget. And today, while people aren’t happy with Obama’s HCR, I don’t get the impression the majority want to see the underlying principle behind it thrown out. Also, I don’t sense any real movement to rethink programs which were already threatening to overwhelm us before HCR made it’s way to reality.
Some do seem to sleep, waking to demand that the brakes be put on. Maybe, even demanding that the car be pulled over while we rethink where we’re going. But quickly, satisfied others have heard their counsel, they fall right back asleep, trusting that those remaining awake have taken their advice to heart. And this seems to happen over, and over. So while the driver and his navigator may put on the brakes, perhaps even stopping for a time, the car is never turned around as the sleepy fella in the back seat has suggested repeatedly. Just a straight undeviating–though haltingly at times–direction down the road. And it doesn’t help that each time the guy in the back seat awakens, the driver has picked up more passengers. Passengers who are staying awake right alongside him, looking foward to getting to whatever is at the end of the road. [/quote]
I don’t disagree with this, and I share some of your pessimism about finding a true antidote to the “car headed in the wrong direction”. My main point was that we can’t know if democracy will fail to fix it until it wakes up first and tries. If it tries and fails, so be it. But we can’t rightly know until the class most affected by the busybodies - the hard-working, relatively apolitical but conservative middle class - wakes up and makes an attempt.
But to your point, I agree it doesn’t look promising - and history is replete with predicate. We’ve seen great societies die off for exactly the same reasons we face today, and the rise of “proletarianization” - the drawing of lines in society from those who consume “bread and circuses” but don’t pay for them and the paying class - has doomed more than one society before.
One note of optimism - we are different in some respects, and never more have a people had more to protect in terms of private interests (which doesn’t just include private property and money). Propety is widely dispersed and isn’t based purely on land. Information is practically instantaneous. We have advantages our predecessor didn’t. That doesn’t mean the outcome will be different, but at least there is an opportunity for it to be so.
[quote]sambaso777 wrote:
Irish, you are partially right. While the government did play a role, of there was honesty in the financial system the sub prime meltdown would have probably been a relatively minor glitch in the grand scheme of things. Take a pharmacy as an example: Your average pharmacy is filled with products that if misused can have potentially dangerous or even fatal, yet no one is calling for pharmacies to be shut down.
The reason is that these products are properly labeled. If however someone where to switch the labels around or label everything as a relatively harmless we would have a dangerous situation. The problem isnt that there were bad loans, there are always going to be risky loans that risky investors are willing to take on. The problem was that risky loans were rebranded as top notch securities and sold to average consumers looking for stable investments.
When consumers bought CDO’s they were buying the rights to the payments on the loan, loans which should not have been made in the first place. the logic was that even if payments were not made, house values would increase, so that equity could be used to pay off the debt. Now the companies could have been smart, (or is that cunning?) by avoiding these CDO’s, but they bought them from each other anyway and then leveraged them with credit default swaps.
I am not denying that the govt planted the seed, but it was wall street that watered and cultivated the plant. Gramm-B-L did play a part because if one section of a company fails, it affects the whole company, and even if it were only affecting what would have been commercial banks, it affects investment banks because they would be involved in the resulting CDO’s and CDS’s.[/quote]
Um, people in finance have been labeling bad things with good names for a long time. People say that Bonds are the ‘safest’, it matters, they say Preferred Stocks are the ‘safest’ stocks, it matters, they say Common Stocks are a great ‘profit’ tool, it matters.
If people are too ignorant to study what they are investing in for a second, I do feel bad for them losing their money, however they can blame no one but themselves.
[quote]thefederalist wrote:
[quote]IrishSteel wrote:
NAME the EXACT REGUALTION that was LOOSENED that resulted in this current state?
and the clock starts now . . .[/quote]
It isn’t his fault that you don’t know anything about finance. Joseph Stiglitz wrote on this subject extensively.
The list goes on…[/quote]
Why would CDS need to be regulated?
[quote]Ryan P. McCarter wrote:
Democracy has not been implemented. On the contrary, it is ONLY democracy that will put an end to the contradictions and antagonisms of the present capitalist system. What you are witnessing is the conflict between the interests of the mass of the people and the continued accumulation on the part of the capitalist class.[/quote]
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t address this painfully stupid observation.
The Greek debacle is no failure of capitalism - in fact, it is the exact opposite: it is the modern failure of democratic socialism/socialism, as the chickens finally came home to roost on unsustainable wealth redisistribution, ever-expanding entitlements and swelling of the state (and its consumption of national wealth).
The only “conflict” at issue is what to do about all of socialism’s failed promises - and more socialism ain’t the answer.
As for the US, the financial meltdown was no failure of the market economy either - if banks had simply lent to borrowers on good old, garden-variety creditworthiness, we’d have dodged an awful lot of nonsense.
Further, if a Federal Reserve could have left well enough alone and let the cost of borrowing rise instead of trying to engineer outcomes (the central bank in charge of the currency has a mandate to achieve full employment???), which would be more attuned to the mechanics of a market economy, then we again would have dodged an awful lot of nonsense.
Instead, government guarantees and policies encouraged - and even subsidized - huge risk taking and greed: who wouldn’t bet huge on mortgages when the government has given you a federal guarantee on the payments?
Two important rules to live by: never listen to a communist, and even more importantly, never listen to an armchair communist whose comfortable lifestyle is supported by the capitalist system he derides and the pup tent he’s has pitched in his daddy’s wallet.
[quote]PAINTRAINDave wrote:
Guys this wasn’t my intention with this thread. I wanted to start a discussion on whether democracies are inherently flawed, and discuss ideas in which to improve western democracies in all countries regardless of location on the political spectrum. Any thoughts?[/quote]
Yes, I believe they are.
Democracy is the idea that government can be run by the will of the people. It is just an other collectivist ideology.
Its biggest flaw is the idea that temporary care takers can replace owners. This necessarily results in socialism because there will always be looters and slaves in a system that can shift the power structure with nothing more than a vote.
Savvy looters will always remain in the looter class while the savvy slave class members try to vote themselves into the looter class.
In a democracy the only thing that changes is who is in the privileged looter class and who must slave to support them.
Description for “Democracy – The God That Failed” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
[quote]The core of this book is a systematic treatment of the historic transformation of the West from monarchy to democracy. Revisionist in nature, it reaches the conclusion that monarchy is a lesser evil than democracy, but outlines deficiencies in both.
Its methodology is axiomatic-deductive, allowing the writer to derive economic and sociological theorems, and then apply them to interpret historical events. A compelling chapter on time preference describes the progress of civilization as lowering time preferences as capital structure is built, and explains how the interaction between people can lower time all around, with interesting parallels to the Ricardian Law of Association.
By focusing on this transformation, the author is able to interpret many historical phenomena, such as rising levels of crime, degeneration of standards of conduct and morality, and the growth of the mega-state. In underscoring the deficiencies of both monarchy and democracy, the author demonstrates how these systems are both inferior to a natural order based on private-property.
Hoppe deconstructs the classical liberal belief in the possibility of limited government and calls for an alignment of conservatism and libertarianism as natural allies with common goals. He defends the proper role of the production of defense as undertaken by insurance companies on a free market, and describes the emergence of private law among competing insurers.
Having established a natural order as superior on utilitarian grounds, the author goes on to assess the prospects for achieving a natural order. Informed by his analysis of the deficiencies of social democracy, and armed with the social theory of legitimation, he forsees secession as the likely future of the US and Europe, resulting in a multitude of region and city-states.
This book complements the author’s previous work defending the ethics of private property and natural order. Democracy - The God that Failed will be of interest to scholars and students of history, political economy, and political philosophy."[/quote]