Woods Workbench

The principle benefit of elections as such is the long-term stability achieved via the creation of a non-violent method for political change independent of the continuing virtue of a single individual, family, or party.  In addition to the potential for a positive change, elections can bring a change toward evil, or from one form of evil to another.  

In considering the prospects for elections in the Middle East, the condition of elections in South America should be examined as it has been a poster-child for moving from authoritarian regimes toward elections.  Polls that I saw a couple years ago indicted growing popular disfavor with “democracy” and nostalgia for authoritarianism across the region.   

Rioting has replaced the ballot box as the method for expelling Presidents in Ecuador.  Demonstrations have brought down Presidents in Peru and Argentina.  The Colombian electoral processes have included assassinations.  In Venezuela, official violence during elections has become the rule for a government that maintains gangs of thugs to deploy against its political opponents.   Further, elections have installed socialists in Chile and Brazil, which has led to additional decay in their civil society.  

Based upon my current reading of Hernando de Soto’s Mystery of Capitalism: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, one core problem is that the change to elections do not necessarily translate into creating the economic freedom necessary for human life.   

In the third world and former communist states, because of the onerous bureaucratic processes consuming years in order to get legal permission to start a business or build a house, extra-legality has become the norm for economic activity and prevents these assets from becoming capital in legally enforceable contracts.  Jack Frake and the gang would find ominous parallels between Peru today and England in Sparrowhawk’s Book I.  

While President Bush has advocated elections as a path to Freedom, he had failed to recognize that Reason and Justice are Freedom’s necessary precursors, and these are in short supply in the Middle East.

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