Lord Acton said Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. The history of political philosophy is about how and when to best use power, by whom and to what ends. Herbert J. Spiro used as his primary criterion for democracy its efficacy in providing the essentials for individual responsibility: predictability, resources, and the freedom to exercise it. But most of the world replaces the individual with the family, village, region, and state. We have carelessly, with little educated thinking,tried recently to instal democracy from the top down, national down to regional down to village. That has little or no history of success--as the breakups of Yugoslavia, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, among others, well demonstrates. We tend to forget that our commitments tend to last only until the next administration. Much of he world has or is discovering that sad limitation to our form of democracy. But as much as we tend to fear Chinas possible coming to own a dangerous amount of American real estate, technology, and some industry we almost never discus how vulnerable we are to white Netherlands, Great Britain, and Belgium which are said to own 40% of Amercas industrial and commercial real estate and major businesses for the first and 30% combined for the latter two countries. Our recent banking crash is largely due to the loss of ethics in our banks and Wall Street investors who are so warped by European corruption. Do we really want Russia, China, and India to model their ethical and business standards on Europe?
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 03:38:03 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015