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Comment by vollmond | Hacker News Reader

"Is freedom a threat to democracy?" is another way to word the headline.

No. But democracy is a threat to freedom.

It's only a threat to the freedom of the privileged, but it protects the freedom of the vulnerable.

OH god no. Democracy is a system which can easily trample on the freedoms of the vulnerable. It's why you need to engineer your actual system of government to give representation to the vulnerable that is hard to ignore.

Democracy is a system designed to give representation to the vulnerable. I suppose you're saying that it's possible to have a poorly designed democracy such as one that gives representation to the majority at the expense of the minority, which I agree with.

Pure democracy can be described as three wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner.

Ha! That's funny. :) But not entirely accurate. The word "democracy" comes from the word "deme" which essentially a group of individually weak people who band together to make sure that they're all represented against other groups.

A deme was (and is) just a small municipality. There were plenty of powerful people who were members of and essentially ran a deme.

Individually weak people can band together and vote to steal from the less weak, but smaller groups. Does voting and being represented make stealing moral?

What happens when those privileged are able to control the primary source of information for the population? It seems likely they would be able to convince the vulnerable to give up their freedom by convincing them it was in their interest.

That's definitely a threat to democracy, but the name of that threat is not "democracy" or "captialism", it's "propaganda".

That is true. The problem is deciding what is or isn't propaganda.

The tyranny of the majority is just as terrible as other types of tyranny.

Not all democracies are "majority rule".

People use freedom as a platitude and have no respect for the meaning of the word. As if it's just a mantra that means absolute good and nothing more.

Is freedom a threat to democracy? Yes, it can be. Freedom to go around killing your political rivals and their supporters is definitely a threat to democracy. Absolute freedom is anarchy, and it's horrible for anyone who is not the most powerful. It's great for them, though.

That's a hyperbolic example. But the freedom of corporations to completely capture political parties and wrest the nation's tiller away from the people and hog it all to themselves is definitely an existential threat for democracy and our well-being. To allow their absolute freedom is a threat to our basic freedoms.

I think one could make an argument that unfettered freedom of speech combined with capitalism is a threat to democracy. Money allows one to purchase speech. Speech allows you to influence people. You can control the people if you can control the money. Money is not distributed equally in a capitalist society which results in the power to influence not being distributed equally. We have all seen this in action.

Therefore if you want a properly functioning democracy you will need campaign finance laws which are inherently restrictions on speech. And even campaign finance reform might not be enough now that we are in an era of constant propaganda that is able to lay the ground work of influencing people outside of election cycles.

Ha, no. "Capitalism" is not a synonym for "freedom" no matter what an-caps might want to believe. It's one economic-political system among many.

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