Again, I will concentrate in the United States because if irresponsible government spending in the United States continues its decades-old pattern, eventually it could trigger a crisis that could destroy American democracy.
If that happens, many other democracies will go down too, because the Chinese and other authoritarian regimes will fill the vacuum left by the US. The sinking of US democracy will to many people be proof of the superiority of totalitarian state-directed capitalism.
Eventually the Chinese people will demand democracy, but we do not know when that will happen, we can not afford to put our hopes in that change.
We can not exclude that the Chinese people in continental China are absorbing what is going on in Taiwan; a country that grew from dictatorship to representative democracy and is now becoming a direct democracy following the Swiss model. If the Chinese of Taiwan are doing it, I know the Chinese in the continent can, and will, do it too, but I do not know when it will happen.
The Chinese on the mainland know the Taiwanese have more prosperity, more freedom than they have. They also know they decide who runs the country and they go now beyond that; they now have direct democracy; the people have more power than the elected politicians and the bureaucrats; that is direct democracy. “We pay me decide”.
Direct democracy means the people can stop government decisions. They also have the power to take the initiative and force the government to do things, even things the government does not want to do.
Taiwan still does not have the track record of the Swiss, but their democracy already surpasses in democratic quality (government by the people) all other countries, except Switzerland.
The people of Taiwan have far more power than the people in the US, in Canada, in France, in Germany, in the UK, etc.
You hear little about Taiwanese direct democracy in those countries. Heck! you hear very little about Swiss direct democracy too; the political elites, their friends and the lobbies influencing the politicians, do not want you to know about direct democracy. This includes most of the media. The reporters in representative democracies are free of the power of the state, but are not free of the power of those who employ them.
But that the many, in the political elites of representative democracies, dislike direct democracy is not surprising; when in the 1800s, the Swiss people got fed with representative democracy because it gives all the decision-making power to the elected politicians, the Swiss politicians did not want to give up that power at all, they resisted, but the people did not give up and the politicians gave in when they run out of “noes”.
Because of that change, Switzerland has the best democracy, it is in a category of its own. Ignore the rankings of The Economist’s “Intelligence” Unit, which places 11 representative democracies ahead of Switzerland in “democratic quality”. Such ranking is an insult to the intelligence.
Not only Switzerland has the democracy of the highest quality, Switzerland is the most prosperous, most stable country in the World, as its track record shows.
Not only that, Switzerland is a neutral country. I am sure it has a lot to do with the fact that the Swiss voters, many of them would die in war, or the parents of those who would die in war, have the power to stop the Swiss government to make war.
This does not mean the Swiss are wide-eyed pacifists; they are armed to the teeth and are good soldiers. One reason why Hitler did not invade Switzerland is that he knew his Panzer divisions could not roll at full speed along Swiss roads like they did on Polish, Belgian, French and Russian roads. He knew German troops would die like rabbits in the Swiss narrow valleys.
If the American people are tired of dying all over the World, of being targets of desperate hot heads, if they are tired of the social mess the US is in, if they want the best universal health care system, if they want low-cost university education, if they want to reduce inequality, if they want to improve their standard of living, if they want to resolve the crazy polarization present in US politicians, in the media and the people themselves, they better get going and demand direct democracy now.
American representative democracy is following too closely the steps of the representative democracy of Weimar in Germany. We know how that ended. One of the crazy things that German democracy did was also “Quantitative Lockerung” (according to Google and Microsoft translators); print money until it is worth nothing. As the German joke of the time says; “if you left a wheelbarrow full of money in the street, the thieves would steal the wheelbarrow and leave the money”.
The Swiss modeled their initial constitution after the American Constitution, but they improved on it with direct democracy. It is now time for the Americans to model their constitution after the Swiss one. It is crucial they do it for themselves and for the survival of democracy in the World. Otherwise, again, it could happen what happened after Ancient Greek direct democracy perished at the hands of totalitarian religious and non-religious leaders; the lights went out for almost 2000 years until the European Renaissance resucitated democracy.
Victor Lopez
