# NYT Twists Itself Into Knots -- Or, How Do Liberals Deal With Messy Democracy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 15, 2009, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208 "2009-04-15T19:21:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/21 "2009-04-15T20:52:24Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Meanwhile, those with a lot of stuff have already demonstrated that they not only can find ways to shift the stuff of others to themselves; they’ve already done it. If you want a government who won’t shift property around, then you should want it to be chosen precisely by those folks who _haven’t_ already done such property-shifting in the private domain. Some see a distinction between “earning” and “taking.” Others don’t. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/22 "2009-04-15T20:56:32Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > Some see a distinction between “earning” and “taking.” Others don’t. In other words, the rich should be allowed to gouge and exploit and tyrannize the poor, and they should have control of the government so they can have poor people who complain imprisoned or murdered. Neofeudalism. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/23 "2009-04-15T21:01:43Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > Put differently, if government didn’t have the power to put a gun to my head and take some of my “accumulated stuff,” I wouldn’t feel so strongly about having those making decisions like that be fellow stuff-earners. Put even differently, those without a lot of stuff seem awfully interested in the stuff of others and finding a way to shift it to them. People with a lot of stuff are also pretty interested in the stuff of others, and in finding ways to shift it to themselves, too. That’s how they got so much stuff in the first place. And the more stuff you have already, the easier it is to shift more stuff your way. A representative government, at the very least, provides some brake on their ability to shift stuff their way without regard to the well-being of the people from whom the stuff is being shifted. Put more simply, having money means you’re already holding a gun to everyone else’s head. A representative democracy simply means everyone else has a gun, too. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/24 "2009-04-15T21:10:35Z")
You seem to think that private property is a natural state of affairs, and that government is interfering with it. This is nonsense: private property is a governmental institution. To the extent that it exists, it exists because of laws. The stronger the protections on private property, the more that government is intruding into the lives of its citizens, by using guns to prevent them from using the materials the government says belong to others. This may be a fine and just intrusion of government into the lives of its subjects, but let’s not pretend that private property is the natural state of things. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/25 "2009-04-15T21:29:29Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > People with a lot of stuff are also pretty interested in the stuff of others, and in finding ways to shift it to themselves, too. That’s how they got so much stuff in the first place. And the more stuff you have already, the easier it is to shift more stuff your way. The sophomore-year “all property is theft” trope always broke down for me because it denies the existence of an arms length transaction between willing sellers and interested buyers negotiating a mutually-satisfactory price for an exchange of goods and services. My local barmaid has over the past X years been enriched to the tune of a few hundred dollars in tips. She’s not rich, but she’s paying her way through college, whereupon she may be in a position to supply other, more value-added services. Her boss, the owner, has made thousands in profits off of me. He **is** rich, but he’s stolen nothing from me; he put together a good menu, a pleasant bar, and an awesome beer selection, and I found his prices fair. His former cook has opened a place of his own one block over. Was the owner stealing from him when he paid him a low wage as a newly-immigrated busboy, a higher wage as a line cook, and a high enough wage as head cook that he now is a capital owner himself? Or was he cheating the owner by taking some portion of the owner’s wealth, transferred from me, in the form of wages? It’s ridiculous to think any of these transactions are coercive in the way that government-mandated, non-consensual income redistribution is. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/26 "2009-04-15T21:56:44Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > The sophomore-year “all property is theft” trope always broke down for me… Sorry, did you mean to quote someone else in this post? Because I’ve never in my life advocated the idea that all property is theft. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/27 "2009-04-15T22:09:30Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > The sophomore-year “all property is theft” trope always broke down for me As opposed to the sophomore-year “all taxes are theft” trope, which you appear quite fond of ? ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/28 "2009-04-15T22:19:36Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > As opposed to the sophomore-year “all taxes are theft” trope, which you appear quite fond of ? I didn’t say that (and will acknowledge that no one here quoted the trope that I reference in the form I reference, though they did state or imply that the only way money got shifted to accumulate with “the rich” was through (implicitly coercive) “taking,” which I don’t agree with. I buy a beer at your tavern, you get rich. No taking. Government forces me to pay taxes in an amount significantly out of proportion to the say-so I get in how it is spent – that’s coercion. I don’t believe taxes are theft per se. When they represent some rough approximation of what I get in return from the government (and yes, I understand that government protection of private property is part of that, but there’s a limit to how much value I place on that given that there are self-help versions of protecting your private property), and when everyone else who gets to vote is similarly a stakeholder who will be harmed if he doesn’t pay enough to, or takes too much from, “government” by virtue of the people/policies he votes in, taxes are a fine and necessary part of the social contract. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/29 "2009-04-15T22:25:01Z")
So in other words, you’re fine with paying taxes to yourself; it’s just paying taxes to anyone else that you object to. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/30 "2009-04-15T22:39:30Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > I didn’t say that (and will acknowledge that no one here quoted the trope that I reference in the form I reference, though they did state or imply that the only way money got shifted to accumulate with “the rich” was through (implicitly coercive) “taking,” which I don’t agree with. Really? Who implied that? Can you point to the post where the implication was made? ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/31 "2009-04-15T22:43:13Z")
He said that, for one. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > In other words, the rich should be allowed to gouge and exploit and tyrannize the poor, and they should have control of the government so they can have poor people who complain imprisoned or murdered. Neofeudalism. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/32 "2009-04-15T22:46:37Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Meanwhile, those with a lot of stuff have already demonstrated that they not only can find ways to shift the stuff of others to themselves; they’ve already done it. If you want a government who won’t shift property around, then you should want it to be chosen precisely by those folks who _haven’t_ already done such property-shifting in the private domain. By characterizing the accumulation of wealth as a “shift” effectuated at the (apparently sole) instance of the accumulating party, this one also ignored the willing-seller/interested buyer scenario in which the “shift” is not something one person is “doing to” another, but is bilaterally desirable. My barkeep getting rich off of me leaves me feeling like I had every choice in the world. Cutting a check on April 15, in an amount that I have very little to effectively no say over (in part because my voting right is given the same weight as a guy on welfare) feels hardly voluntary at all. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/33 "2009-04-15T22:54:25Z")
In neither of those posts has anyone suggested or implied that the only way to accumulate wealth is to take it through force. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/34 "2009-04-15T22:55:45Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > If there were not to be a large, centralized, and coercive taxing and spending authority as the “government,” your statement might be true. But in such a government (which I’d be happy to walk away from, at which point, I would not care as much who had the franchise), it is ever more true that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and there are some very perverse incentives created when those voting for the taxes/taxers do not bear any economic consequence (except perhaps a net transfer of wealth to them) from their economic decision to vote for someone who will tax the stuff. Put differently, if government didn’t have the power to put a gun to my head and take some of my “accumulated stuff,” I wouldn’t feel so strongly about having those making decisions like that be fellow stuff-earners. Put even differently, those without a lot of stuff seem awfully interested in the stuff of others and finding a way to shift it to them. People who say things like this always seem to assume they’d be the ones with the stuff. In practice, in countries where large amounts of stuff tends to accumulate in the hands of a few, it’s 1% people with wealth, and 99% people living on the edge of starvation with no hope of ever changing their lot in life. Try to imagine being one of the 99% rather than the 1% and see if your opinion changes. ---
**Author:** ![Huerta88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/82dd89/32.png) [@Huerta88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Huerta88)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/35 "2009-04-15T22:57:21Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > In neither of those posts has anyone suggested or implied that the only way to accumulate wealth is to take it through force. No. But coercion or unilateral transfer are the only examples of wealth accumulation they see fit to mention, when they are in fact far from the only vehicles to it. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/36 "2009-04-15T22:57:37Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > I buy a beer at your tavern, you get rich. No taking. Government forces me to pay taxes in an amount significantly out of proportion to the say-so I get in how it is spent – that’s coercion. What stops me from walking into your bar and pouring myself a drink free of charge, except for coercion? The protection of private property rights involves coercion every bit as much as taxation does. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Hamster\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/8edcca/32.png) [@The\_Hamster\_King](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Hamster_King)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/37 "2009-04-15T22:59:23Z")
**Huerta88** , you seem to assume that if you give the poor political power they will inevitably use to benefit themselves. But if you give more political power to the rich through property requirements and poll taxes, won’t they do the same thing? ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/38 "2009-04-15T23:05:20Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > Liberals (and neo-cons) (say they) like democracy. > > But then you go and install or support a couple of democracies in the wackier parts of the world, and it turns out – not so much. Turns out that what large parts of the democratically empowered populace wants isn’t congenial to a Manhattan cocktail party audience. > > [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15wed1.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15wed1.html) > > Are there any liberals who would look at examples like this and (1) admit that “democracy” is not an end in itself, nor a panacea; (2) admit that some cultures aren’t ready for democracy; (3) draw lessons from these failed “democracies” to infer that unlimited popular enfranchisement, one-man, one-vote might have some downsides even in the civilized West; or (4) just throw up their hands, stick to the democracy-is-always-a-good position, and give it an vox dei, vox populi pass? > > Or would it just be the implicit position of the NYT: No, not **that** type of democracy! I haven’t read the thread yet, but I just wanted to say that the first post is the silliest one I’ve seen in quite awhile. Do conservatives say they like democracy? Wasn’t it a conservative that went on his little nation-building excursion? Oh, but he wasn’t a real conservative, right? Don’t you think that liberals want democracies with human rights? This liberal thinks democracies are the answer. But they need to have basic human rights. ---
**Author:** ![Driver8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5a626/32.png) [@Driver8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Driver8)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/39 "2009-04-15T23:07:46Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > No. But coercion or unilateral transfer are the only examples of wealth accumulation they see fit to mention, when they are in fact far from the only vehicles to it. Yet they appear to be the examples you are most in favor of, given your inclination to only allow those with wealth to vote. By disenfranchising the poor you are in effect giving free reign to those with wealth to set all policy, which everyone has to live by. Apparently the poor won’t be able to resist the “perverse incentives” to take all the wealthy people’s money, but the wealthy, who are different from the poor in that their heart’s are made of gold and they will never consider doing anything unethical, will be able to resist setting policy that discriminates in their own favor? ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 15, 2009, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208/40 "2009-04-15T23:27:44Z")
> [@Huerta88](#): > > No. But coercion or unilateral transfer are the only examples of wealth accumulation they see fit to mention, when they are in fact far from the only vehicles to it. Yes, and that’s because those are precisely the sort of exchanges that are curtailed by the exercise of representative democracy, which you oppose. Seeing as they were trying to demonstrate why representative democracy is a good thing, those would be precisely the sort of exchanges they would mention, as they’re the kind that are directly relevant to the point they’re trying to prove. The fact that they didn’t mention other kinds of exchanges does not imply that they think those exchanges don’t exist, it is merely a byproduct of the fact that those exchanges do not factor into their argument. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-twists-itself-into-knots-or-how-do-liberals-deal-with-messy-democracy/493208.md?page=3)