What the hell is a “democratic economy”? This term has no meaning whatsoever. You have repeatedly exercised your freedom to be unencumbered by facts. Maybe for once you can exercise the opposite freedom.

The father of the current Chilean president was a cabinet member of Allende’s government. He and his family were arrested and tortured by Pinochet’s junta, he died in jail and his daughter (the current president) was exiled. She lived and studied in East Germany. Enough said.

True, in the short run. But eventually democratic principles are what keep capitalism expanding, legitimate and relevant. If not regulated by such principles capitalism will eventually destroy itself due to its own contradictions. Authoritarian governments handling economic matters eventually become stale and atrophy because they represent a closed society and old ideas. Democracy revitalizes the process through debate, reexamination and the introduction of new policies and individuals. Capitalism and democracy counterbalance each other as well as prod each other to regenerate and do better, like in a ‘double helix’.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Just look around and see how many states have converted or are converting from authoritarian government to more democratic economies, and have achieved better results. (Democracy also establishes and upholds property rights which are essential to the process of capitalism.) South Korea, Chile, Taiwan, Argentina, India, China are a few countries that come to mind. However, it is authoritarian government in those countries that initially got that all important capitalism rolling. But authoritarian capitalism is not sustainable because it lacks accountability and transparency.

add1 -”Liberal states use®esources to transform the survival of the fittest from a violent, warlike game to a peaceful, economic game.” That’s good!

Well, obviously no one ever wants to participate in any “survival of the fittest” game. Everyone wants to have a safe, guaranteed, easy life without any fighting (even the economic kind), without taking chances. And these are people who – in a democracy – control these ‘liberal states’ you’re talking about.

If the people really have the power to design the game – the game they themselves will have to play – how can do you expect them to create anything even close to any sort of “survival of the fittest” game? That’s totally unrealistic.

No, that’s wrong: capitalism functions best under an authoritarian government. Liberal democracy tilts toward socialism. Liberal democracy undoubtedly erodes capitalism and it seems that it may eventually destroy it altogether.

Unless of course, you believe that democracy is synonymous with equity. Democracy is a process, just like capitalism. The results of this process have nothing to with capitalism and democracy.

I have always thought that socialism smacked of “intelligent design”. And just like the ID salesmen would be quite shocked to learn that the human genome is highly functional yet rife with useless sequences and redundancy, and quite obviously not intelligently designed, so the central planners were shocked to learn that anarchical capitalist economies were more efficient than their own. It was joked in the 80s that the Soviet economy had three industries: defense, oil, and vodka. That makes sense, because three industries is about all a central planning committee can handle.

Liberal states use minimal resources to transform the survival of the fittest from a violent, warlike game to a peaceful, economic game. This does not mean that the unfit are not selected against. It simply means that they are marginalized and left either to reform or die off. Call it “soft culling”. Any goals beyond this transformation – however politically popular – posit a desired result rather than a desired process.

Desired results are exactly ideology. Infusing your life with grand ideas and metaphysical implications is the bane of human history. Infusing the world with metaphysics is intelligent design. Just do what you need to survive, and accept the results as is. Just like a capitalist economy, I believe this will produce better results than conscious attempts to construct utopia.

I agree with you: without ideology, there cannot be society. But why must there be society?

Qualifier: conscious control can be used in reasonable amounts to catch up to leaders, once the way forward is known. Hence my assent to capitalist dictatorships as modernization vehicles.

Qualifier: intelligent design is possible when the problem is highly constrained, such as microprocessor design. The number of design parameters is tightly bounded, and performance can be measured and compared to the theoretical optimum. Even so, current research into design focuses heavily on automatic or evolutionary design tools as problem complexity grows. I have no way of placing a number on this, but at some point complexity is too great for designers and you must simply through a lot of mutants at the market and see what happens.

I’m an engineer if you haven’t guessed so already :)

What Fukuyama tried to say in his formulation is that technologically advanced societies can not live without the combination of capitalism and democracy. For modern societies to survive and continue in the modern world they need the combination of the two. Each doctrine on its own is not sufficient enough to sustain modern society. Fukuyama seemed so emphatic about this combination being necessary for sustaining modern society that one critic wondered if they may be the DNA of the modern world.

Capitalism and democracy appear to contradict each other. But together they address and satisfy the condition of the modern human being. Capitalism satisfies the material needs of modern societies and democracy satisfies the political needs. However, it also appears that neither doctrine can exist without the other.

Francis Fukuyama, in his book, “The End of History” believed that humankind had reached an end point in its ideological evolution. This ideological end point has to do with human governance. He got the idea when Communism collapsed, with the end of the Cold War and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that point there was only one form of legitimate government left standing in the world, Democracy. To Fukuyama’s way of thinking Democracy had triumphed over all other forms of human governance, hence the end of history.

‘The end of history’ in this case means the end of a particular history, the end of the ideological struggle to determine what form of government is best for the people of the world. Otherwise History has not ended, because as long as there are people on earth to make it there will always be History.

Actually I would say there is a lot wrong with that, in this day and age. I might also point out that the main reason that it is in that state is that after it was ‘liberated’ by the ‘West’ in ‘91, ‘we’ immediately handed power back to the freedom loving Kuwaiti junta…no nonsense about democracy there! Isn’t it funny, incidentally, how according to the Keyboard Kommandos the purpose of the ‘91 war was to liberate Iraq I distinctly remember being told at the time it was to liberate Kuwait…this justifies the ‘we should have marched on to Baghdad’ rhetoric, forgetting that, if we had been interested in democracy, democratising Kuwait would have been at the forefront of our agenda, and would (unlike in Iraq) have been relatively easy to do. And yet we didn’t. How strange.

Almost every country in the world is a post-colonial state. (possible exception: Iceland?)

So, you’re making assumptions about my assumptions?

I dont assume anything, but I’ll take the blame for starting off with the snide remarks.

Well, since you were talking about cryptoracism, navel-gazing, utter ignorance of anything about the world that does not revolve around “the West” or “white people”, and so on, I thought that some amount of inferential reasoning was in order, yes.

All in good fun, though.

Absence of ideology is not possible in a society; without ideology there would be no society.

Modernity is not absence of ideology, modernity is rationality. Iraqi regime was rational and Stalinism was rational too.

The way I see it, those ideologies based on unsubstantiated faith, on supernatural stuff (gods, space aliens, etc) are irrational; those based on observed natural phenomena are rational. Nationalism is rational, communism is rational and liberalism is rational. All rational ideologies are a part of modernity, whether we like them of not.

I don’t know (and neither do you) whether Hussein was paranoid and conflated military glory with national glory, but it’s only marginally relevant, because one way or the other the Iraqi society was rational and modern. Same assumptions (paranoid, messianic megalomaniac) could be made (and often are) about George Bush (or any other modern leader for that matter) – so what?

Now, the Kuwait society is heavily based on Islamic Law. That’s not rational and therefore not modern. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just a fact.

Novakant, care to elaborate?

Btw, if the Berlin situation was indeed as horrible (“causing untold grief to millions”) as you say, it could’ve been most easily and naturally resolved by Americans and Brits getting out, taking their troops out of West Berlin. Poof – solved, no wall, no problem, no more untold grief to millions. What do you think about this idea, Novakant? Never thought of it this way, huh, doesn’t make sense, right?