One last challenge
Don Myers, who teaches at Bellevue HS in Bellevue, Washington, gave this to his near-graduation seniors. He "asked them (1) to relate the article to the 5 countries (other than the UK) we studied and (2) whether the experience of those countries supported or contradicted the author's thesis."Wow! That's a lot to ask of anxious seniors a few days before graduation. But, the excellent op-ed piece is full of assertions and reasonable bits of evidence. And the AP countries (including the UK) are relevant to most of what Matt Manweller wrote.
The opinion piece was written by Manweller, an assistant professor of political science at Central Washington University in Ellensburg and chairman of the Kittitas County Republican Central Committee.
This is good enough that you might want to save this article now and use it a year from now. (I may be expressing my pessimism about how much will change politically by then.)
Liberty: A capital idea
"As a nation, we have messianic tendencies. We want to make the world a better place, but we often recoil at the real-world consequences of pursuing such policies. Our experience in Iraq requires us to re-examine the practicality of our goals and tactics...
"There are two reasons why initiating democracy early will not bring economic, social or political stability... First, democracy only works in places where it doesn't matter if you lose. Second, democracy does not bring about liberty. Liberty, though, may bring about democracy...
"Democracy doesn't work in some... places because it matters if you lose. If you lose, you may have all your property taken, or worse, you die...
"Democracy does not cultivate liberty because democracy trades tyranny of the one for tyranny of the 51 percent. It does nothing to limit the power of government, protect the rights of minorities, or establish the rule of law...
"[H]istory has shown that capitalism (more so than democracy) does an excellent job of fostering property rights, independent courts, the rule of law, and dispersing power to multiple stakeholders — particularly in countries that have few cultural predispositions toward civil society...
"Russia and China offer an ongoing test of this process. Which one will be a freer society in 10 years? My money is on China. Russia hurried headlong into democracy. Now it has little more than a kleptocracy. China, which has moved to capitalism but not democracy, is emerging as the freer society..."
posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:55 AM
1 Comments:
Patricia Cohen's analysis in the New York Times is a good companion to M's op-ed piece on the relationships among democracy, capitalism, and liberty.
An Unexpected Odd Couple: Free Markets and Freedom
"When President Bush declared last week that political openness naturally accompanied economic openness, his counterparts in Beijing and Moscow were not the only ones to object. Liberal and conservative intellectuals, even once ardent supporters, have backed away from the century-old theory that democracy and capitalism, like Paris Hilton and paparazzi, need each other to survive.
"From China, where astounding economic growth persists despite Communist Party rule, to Russia, where President Vladimir V. Putin has squelched opposition, to Venezuela, where dissent is silenced, developments around the world have been tearing jawbreaker-size holes in what has been a remarkably powerful idea, not only in academic circles but also in both Republican and Democratic administrations — that capitalism and democracy are two sides of a coin.
"'People, including myself, still have reasons to think it will eventually happen,' Francis Fukuyama, a political economist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said of China’s evolution to democracy. 'But the time frame has to be a lot longer.' At least in the next couple of decades, he said, it is likely that 'the authoritarian system will keep going and get stronger.'
"Mr. Fukuyama, perhaps more than anyone else, has been associated with the idea that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked. In his famous essay, The End of History, written in 1989 as the Soviet Union was in decline, he declared that all nations would ultimately develop into Western-style liberal democracies..."
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