Or Do Without It
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Democracy, advertised as the best available form of government, has at least three unadvertised imperfections. First, it enables democratic governments to claim legitimacy for their police powers by asserting that those powers are authorized by the people. Whether or not the powers are legitimate, it’s a fact that all governments, democratic or otherwise, exercise the same police powers, for the same reasons, and with the same results. Second, by voluntarily participating in a democracy, people submit themselves to the jurisdiction of the government. Since the participation is voluntary, the jurisdiction, no matter how
oppressive it might become, is legitimate. Third, democracy inveigles
people into the false belief that they have some kind of control over
their government. Actually, the power to vote doesn’t provide any
control at all over either the officials or the government. Democracy also has an unadvertised limitation.
That is, if a government is too large for all of its voters to get together in one place, all at the same time, and vote by a
show of hands, so that every vote is known to be legitimate and
every vote is known to have been counted, then that government is
too large to be a successful democracy. In any such large government, the voting must be conducted in remote locations, and the elections
must be administered by some kind of a bureaucracy. That will
provide an irresistible opportunity for every possible kind of voter
fraud, and give the government every possible excuse to surveil and
control the voters. As a result, any such large government will
eventually degenerate into a police state. The only way to avoid
such an eventuality is for such a large government to be divided into
as many smaller governments as it takes to make small, local elections feasible. Such small governments might form alliances or associations with one another, for one purpose or another, but the jurisdiction of
each small government must always supercede the jurisdiction of any
alliance of them. Otherwise, they’ll eventually consolidate into
one large government, and become a police state. The arguments against small governments fail when we consider that the consolidation, in the past, of
small governments into large governments, for example, the consolidation of city states into nation states, hasn’t made things better.
People are not happier, or more secure, with large governments than they were with small governments. Any improvement in our conditions that might have happened is attributable to technology, not to large governments. The police powers of large governments are just as oppressive as were the police powers of small governments. The world isn’t more peaceful now than it was then. The transition from
small governments to large governments only enabled large conflicts.
Small conflicts still occur, but I doubt that any two city states that ever existed could have perpetrated such an atrocity as World War II. It took large governments to do that. In most ways, large governments have made things worse, not better. Most people believe that government is
a necessary evil, and that democracy is the best available
form of government. I suggest that such beliefs are based on false assumptions, misinformation, and missing information.
Before we accept such beliefs, it might be useful to study my essays
under the heading Essays About Liberty, Sovereignty, and the Doctrine of Social Contract, in Pharos. Those essays might provide a better understanding of government, and of some better ways that we might manage it, or even do without it.
Letters to the Editor
Dear Sam,
That story from that Arkansas prisoner in your Sept Frontiersman, I find no reason not to believe his story. Arkansas, a red state, loves to deprive people of as much as they can. Politicians love to use such treatment in their ads as “tough on crime”! I saw on the news one day that in California, students get free breakfast, free lunch, and students deemed “nutritionally deprived” get sent home with a bag dinner. I was amazed. I said to my cellie, “is that common”, he said “yeah, doesn’t every kid in the U.S.A. get free food?” HA HA HA, I grew up as a child in Louisiana, Georgia, and rural Oregon. If you 
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The Gettysburg address: 286 words