Category: Bullshit Institutions

Too much amnesia in the Original Position of John Rawls

John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice (1971) posits a group of rational people who are told to deliberate on rules of justice for a life they will have after being transported into some unpredictable human condition in some unpredictable institutional situations.

He concludes that the only rational choice is to agree on two principles. The following formulation here will suffice:

The two principles of justice are the liberty principle and the difference principle. The two principles are intended to apply to the basic structure of society–the fundamental political and economic arrangements–as opposed to particular actions by governmental officials or individual statutes. The liberty principle requires that the basic structure provide each citizen with a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties — such as freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, and due process of law. The difference principle requires that inequalities in wealth and social position be arranged so as to the benefit the worst off group in the world. Rawls states that the two principles are lexically ordered, with the liberty principle taking precedence over the difference principle in the case of conflict.

As it turns out, although the altered condition of the people in the Original Position is unpredictable, their transported institutional situation seems to be a liberal democratic society with a capitalist economy. So, in effect they are asked to write a meta-law for, let’s say, the Constitution of the United States. In effect, the second principle would require the introduction of either a right to a job for all or a basic income for all, and perhaps a free universal health care.

What these people in the Original Position seem to have forgotten is that they are animals on earth who need access to subsistence, and that they can get this subsistence if they have a free access to land. Before the contents of some agreed to rule is adopted, it is first necessary to make agreements in the first place. So, it seems that the first order of business is to come up with two meta-rules: Meta-Rule 1: Make Agreement (on Rules) rather than resort to coercion (War); Meta-Rule 2: Abide by the agreements (Rules).

Really, instead of the contrived Original Position, a more historically realistic situation is envisioned by John Stuart Mill. He imagines a group of colonists arriving at some uninhabited land.

Book II, Chapter 1. Principles of Political Economy:

In considering the institution of property as a question in social philosophy, we must leave out of consideration its actual origin in any of the existing nations of Europe. We may suppose a community unhampered by any previous possession; a body of colonists, occupying for the first time an uninhabited country; bringing nothing with them but what belonged to them in common, and having a clear field for the adoption of the institutions and polity which they judged most expedient; required, therefore, to choose whether they would conduct the work of production on the principle of individual property, or on some system of common ownership and collective agency.

If private property were adopted, we must presume that it would be accompanied by none of the initial inequalities and injustices which obstruct the beneficial operation of the principle in old societies. Every full grown man or woman, we must suppose, would be secured in the unfettered use and disposal of his or her bodily and mental faculties; and the instruments of production, the land and tools, would be divided fairly among them, so that all might start, in respect to outward appliances, on equal terms. It is possible also to conceive that in this original apportionment, compensation might be made for the injuries of nature, and the balance redressed by assigning to the less robust members of the community advantages in the distribution, sufficient to put them on a par with the rest. But the division, once made, would not again be interfered with; individuals would be left to their own exertions and to the ordinary chances, for making an advantageous use of what was assigned to them. If individual property, on the contrary, were excluded, the plan which must be adopted would be to hold the land and all instruments of production as the joint property of the community, and to carry on the operations of industry on the common account. The direction of the labour of the community would devolve upon a magistrate or magistrates, whom we may suppose elected by the suffrages of the community, and whom we must assume to be voluntarily obeyed by them. The division of the produce would in like manner be a public act. The principle might either be that of complete equality, or of apportionment to the necessities or deserts of individuals, in whatever manner might be conformable to the ideas of justice or policy prevailing in the community.

Examples of such associations, on a small scale, are the monastic orders, the Moravians, the followers of Rapp, and others: and from the hopes, which they hold out of relief from the miseries and iniquities of a state of much inequality of wealth, schemes for a larger application of the same idea have reappeared and become popular at all periods of active speculation on the first principles of society. In an age like the present [1848], when a general reconsideration of all first principles is felt to be inevitable, and when more than at any former period of history the suffering portions of the community have a voice in the discussion, it was impossible but that ideas of this nature should spread far and wide. The late revolutions in Europe have thrown up a great amount of speculation of this character, and an unusual share of attention has consequently been drawn to the various forms which these ideas have assumed: nor is this attention likely to diminish, but on the contrary, to increase more and more.

Rawls’ problem is caused by starting off with a bad idea of justice. Justice, in short, is simply the virtue of keeping to your agreements.

Anyway, here is Noam Chomsky’s view of Rawls:

Extinction Rebellion

Today is the second day of the demonstration of the Extinction Rebellion in London. I am fully in sympathy with this movement to force governments to stop carbon dioxide emissions. But I am skeptical that this movement will succeed. And, after all, they are not addressing the underlying cause of our situation — overpopulation.

See also the interview with the co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam.

Let’s take a look at Distributism

Let me start with a confession. I have been prone to commit a genetic fallacy — namely, not to bother reading some writings simply because they were by self-proclaimed Catholic authors. One could also call this a prejudice. Well, I am going to correct this mistake.

Generally, it is a fallacy to dismiss a conclusion of an argument because the argument is fallacious. In other words, a person may be defending something which is true or sensible, but for bad reasons. Also, it would be some kind of fallacy of bad association to think that because a person is wrong about some subject X, that this person is also wrong about subject Y.

Specifically, I reject superstitions, including religions. So for me to ignore writers who proclaim an adherence to a religious faith, is narrow minded.

For a bird’s eye view of Distributism, let’s start with the Wikipedia entry: Distributism. [It is generally wise to start an investigation by looking at a Wikipedia entry. But it is foolish to stop there.]

I found the following video on G. K. Chesterton by Laurie M. Johnson helpful — though I would like to add some commentary later on. She is talking about the following book: G. K. Chesterton, THE OUTLINE OF SANITY, 1927.

Introduction to G.K. Chesterton and Distributism

This video introduces you briefly to GK Chesterton and then discusses his definitions of Capitalism, Socialism and Distributism. I point out that Aristotle’s views on property in The Politics may be the origin of distributist thought, and give some background information that may help understand why Chesterton defines Capitalism and Communism as he does. Chesterton criticizes Capitalism for really being “Proletarianism” or a system of wage dependency. He criticizes Socialism for being dangerous because it places all resources and decisions into the hands of the state. Both of them concentrate property into a few hands, whereas Distributism calls for spreading property ownership more evenly. Spain’s Mondragon corporation is used as an example of contemporary distributism at work.

More of her videos on Distributism can be found here: Laurie M. Johnson

Commentary:

In the above video, Laurie Johnson claims that Chesterton did not really mean that everyone should have 3 acres and a cow. Well, what he probably meant is that people should have a private plot sufficiently large for self-sufficient subsistence. But Laurie thinks that this today is unrealistic, and offers a worker-owned enterprise such as the Mondragon Corporation as an example of Distributionism. Well, this may be Laurie’s proposal, but it was not what Chesterton had in mind.

However, in the following video with her participants she is more reflective of what is involved in sustaining subsistence farming (as in India), and the problems involved in switching to a more agrarian form of life.

What happens when people in slums revolt?

The straightforward answer is: South Africa, from July 9 to July 18, 2021. As a background to what occurred, see: 2021 South African unrest.

Here is a video of the recent events in South Africa:

where do such rebellious people come from? Slums. And it only takes some event such as the killing of George Floyd in the United States for the alienated poor to go on a rampage. Below are videos describing some slums around the world.

Here is a video of the Kibera Slums in Kenya:

Here is a video of a slum in Mumbai:

Here is a slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:

Lunik 9, the biggest Roma slum in Kosice, Slovakia, Europe:

Thinking about assassinations

Yesterday’s assassination of Jovenal Moise, the President of Haiti, on July 7, 2021, made me think about assassinations in general.

To begin, what is an assassination? Of course, it is a type of killing. But whereas unjustified intentional killings are called “murders,” an assassination in some sense transcends that label. It is a targeted killing for some political, economic, or ideological reason; normally, of some prominent individual.

By contrast, in warfare, a sniper’s killing of a general or a king is not likely to be called an assassination.

Let me distinguish bottom-up and top-down assassinations. The assassination of a President or some government official is a bottom-up assassination, and these are the assassinations which we are familiar with. Here is a list: List of assassinations

However, when a ruler targets someone to assassinate, this goes by the euphemistic phrase of “targeted killing.” Lists of such attempted and successful assassinations (“targeted killings”) can be found here:List of assassinations by the United States; List of Soviet and Russian assassinations; List of Israeli assassinations.

See: Nils Melzer, Targeted Killing in International Law, 2008; Claire Finkelstein, Jens David Ohlin, and Andrew Altman (ed.), Targeted Killings: Law and Morality in an Asymmetrical World, 2012; Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, 2018.

Most such “targeted killings” have been covert. The first nearly overt one which caught my attention was the U.S. invasion of Panama by President George H. W. Bush on Dec. 20, 1989 in order to capture Manuel Noriega. To me this was worse than any “targeted killing,” because it involved the killing of needless American soldiers and some 500 Panamanian civilians.

After 9/11, with the so-called “war on terror” and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, “targeted killings” became something like a common practice. Under President Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, Answar al-Awlaki and his son were assassinated, and killing by the use of drones became a standard procedure.

The other assassination which looms large in my mind was that of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, approved by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.

This practice of “targeted killings” as a strategy, rather than being a “war on terror,” has tended to create something approaching a totalitarian state of terror!

Bottom-Up Assassinations

Given that most governments are in the hands of single rulers (be they monarchs, presidents, or prime-ministers), they tend to be ambitious, greedy, inept, or ruthless. And the intent of most assassinations of prominent officials is simply to get rid of a perceived evil vermin.

There is one prominent exception that I can think of. It is the assassination of Emperor Alexander II of Russia in 1881 by Narodnaya Volya. Their hope was not to kill a man, but to kill a system — to start a revolution, which did not materialize.

A Commentary on Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”

Many years ago when I came across the first edition of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), I was so amazed by its perspective and scholarship that I wrote to Zinn, and asked permission to put it on the Internet. He replied by simply referring me to his publisher. Well, not getting an outright refusal, I digitized the book and placed it on the Internet, and there it stayed until Zinn died in 2010. [I looked for the book on my site in the WaybackMachine, and I found it for Feb. 17, 2006]. Soon after Zinn’s death, I received an email from his publisher pointing out that the book was copyrighted and was requested to remove it from the Internet. I did. But by that time someone in China had placed my pages on their own web site. Well, whatever is going on with the copyright issue, an updated copy is available here: Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.

At this point in time, my only criticism of Zinn’s book is that it did not focus sufficiently on land rights in the United States, as presented in such a book as: Charles Beard and Mary Beard, History of the United States, 1921; or such a book as: Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1936, 1942. [A full copy is available for borrowing at Internet Archive.]

My point is that access to subsistence land is necessary for sheer animal existence, and such access in the British colonies was never free. Land was granted to individuals and corporations by the Kings of England, and these individuals and corporations had to create a profit for themselves and the King.

Below is an illustration of this from the Beards’ History:

Feudal Elements in the Colonies – Quit Rents, Manors, and Plantations. – At the other end of the scale were the feudal elements of land tenure found in the proprietary colonies, in the seaboard regions of the South, and to some extent in New York. The proprietor was in fact a powerful feudal lord, owning land granted to him by royal charter. He could retain any part of it for his personal use or dispose of it all in large or small lots. While he generally kept for himself an estate of baronial proportions, it was impossible for him to manage directly any considerable part of the land in his dominion. Consequently he either sold it in parcels for lump sums or granted it to individuals on condition that they make to him an annual payment in money, known as “quit rent.” In Maryland, the proprietor sometimes collected as high as £9000 (equal to about $500,000 to-day) in a single year from this source. In Pennsylvania, the quit rents brought a handsome annual tribute into the exchequer of the Penn family. In the royal provinces, the king of England claimed all revenues collected in this form from the land, a sum amounting to £19,000 at the time of the Revolution. The quit rent, – “really a feudal payment from freeholders,” – was thus a material source of income for the crown as well as for the proprietors. Wherever it was laid, however, it proved to be a burden, a source of constant irritation; and it became a formidable item in the long list of grievances which led to the American Revolution.

Something still more like the feudal system of the Old World appeared in the numerous manors or the huge landed estates granted by the crown, the companies, or the proprietors. In the colony of Maryland alone there were sixty manors of three thousand acres each, owned by wealthy men and tilled by tenants holding small plots under certain restrictions of tenure. In New York also there were many manors of wide extent, most of which originated in the days of the Dutch West India Company, when extensive concessions were made to patroons to induce them to bring over settlers. The Van Rensselaer, the Van Cortlandt, and the Livingston manors were so large and populous that each was entitled to send a representative to the provincial legislature. The tenants on the New York manors were in somewhat the same position as serfs on old European estates. They were bound to pay the owner a rent in money and kind; they ground their grain at his mill; and they were subject to his judicial power because he held court and meted out justice, in some instances extending to capital punishment.

The manors of New York or Maryland were, however, of slight consequence as compared with the vast plantations of the Southern seaboard – huge estates, far wider in expanse than many a European barony and tilled by slaves more servile than any feudal tenants. It must not be forgotten that this system of land tenure became the dominant feature of a large section and gave a decided bent to the economic and political life of America. (Chapter 2)

After the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, a question arose as to the status of lands westward of the colonies. These eventually became known as the public domain, and by the Ordinance of May 20, 1785, the following measures went into effect:

In line with the earlier abolition of feudal incidents, the ordinance adopted allodial tenure, that is, land was to pass in fee simple from the government to the first purchaser. After clearing the Indian title and surveying the land the government was to sell it at auction to the highest bidder. Townships were to be surveyed six miles square and alternate ones subdivided into lots one mile square, each lot consisting of 640 acres to be known as a section. No land was to be sold until the first seven ranges of townships were marked off. A minimum price was fixed at $1 per acre to be paid in specie, loan-office certificates, or certificates of the liquidated debt, including interest. The purchaser was to pay surveying expenses of $36 per township. Congress reserved sections 8, 11, 26, and 29 in each township, and one-third of all precious metals later discovered therein. In addition the sixteenth section of each township was set aside for the purpose of providing common schools.

[I add the following table:

Township = 36 sections
654321
789101112
181716151413
192021222324
302928272625
313233343536
[Robbins, Chapter I]

Land was, thus, not available for free, and those who illegally settled on any land were squatters, who, when the surveys reached their land holdings had to pay or be booted out. The other major problem was that land was sold only in huge chunks; so that only wealthy speculators could afford to buy it, which they then resold to settlers for a profit.

As to the Homestead Act of 1862 which granted 160 acres for free; although Zinn points out that only inferior land was made available, he does not mention the exorbitant cost to the pioneer to undertake such a possession. See: Clarence H. Danhof, “FARM-MAKING COSTS AND THE “SAFETY VALVE”: 1850-60,” The Journal of Political Economy, Volume XLIX, Number 3, June 1941: 317-359.

In conclusion, I think that Zinn was right on target in the following excerpt in realizing that freedom from slavery without a free access to subsistence land is just another form of slavery — wage slavery.

Many Negroes understood that their status after the war, whatever their situation legally, would depend on whether they owned the land they worked on or would be forced to be semi-slaves for others. In 1863, a North Carolina Negro wrote that “if the strict law of right and justice is to be observed, the country around me is the entailed inheritance of the Americans of African descent, purchased by the invaluable labor of our ancestors, through a life of tears and groans, under the lash and yoke of tyranny.”

Abandoned plantations, however, were leased to former planters, and to white men of the North. As one colored newspaper said: “The slaves were made serfs and chained to the soil. . . . Such was the boasted freedom acquired by the colored man at the hands of the Yankee.”

Under congressional policy approved by Lincoln, the property confiscated during the war under the Confiscation Act of July 1862 would revert to the heirs of the Confederate owners. Dr. John Rock, a black physician in Boston, spoke at a meeting: “Why talk about compensating masters? Compensate them for what? What do you owe them? What does the slave owe them? What does society owe them? Compensate the master? . . . It is the slave who ought to be compensated. The property of the South is by right the property of the slave. . . .”

Some land was expropriated on grounds the taxes were delinquent, and sold at auction. But only a few blacks could afford to buy this. In the South Carolina Sea Islands, out of 16,000 acres up for sale in March of 1863, freedmen who pooled their money were able to buy 2,000 acres, the rest being bought by northern investors and speculators. A freedman on the Islands dictated a letter to a former teacher now in Philadelphia:

My Dear Young Missus: Do, my missus, tell Linkum dat we wants land – dis bery land dat is rich wid de sweat ob de face and de blood ob we back. . . . We could a bin buy all we want, but dey make de lots too big, and cut we out.

De word cum from Mass Linkum’s self, dat we take out claims and hold on ter um, an’ plant um, and he will see dat we get um, every man ten or twenty acre. We too glad. We stake out an’ list, but fore de time for plant, dese commissionaries sells to white folks all de best land. Where Linkum?

In early 1865, General William T. Sherman held a conference in Savannah, Georgia, with twenty Negro ministers and church officials, mostly former slaves, at which one of them expressed their need: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and till it by our labor. . . .” Four days later Sherman issued “Special Field Order No. 15,” designating the entire southern coastline 30 miles inland for exclusive Negro settlement. Freedmen could settle there, taking no more than 40 acres per family. By June 1865, forty thousand freedmen had moved onto new farms in this area. But President Andrew Johnson, in August of 1865, restored this land to the Confederate owners, and the freedmen were forced off, some at bayonet point.

Ex-slave Thomas Hall told the Federal Writers’ Project:

Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He gave us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food, and clothing, and he held us out of necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery.

Divide and Rule (Divide et Impera)

Let’s imagine that there is a land of foragers living in scattered tribes. Well, actually you don’t have to imagine this, because that was the situation in America and Africa before the arrival of Europeans. These Europeans came and simply declared that such and such territory belongs to the king of X. If there were any objection from the natives, the Europeans rattled their sabers, and that settled the matter. The territory was conquered!

Franz Oppenheimer, in his book The State,(1919) saw no other way of turning tribal territories into States except through conquest. The conquerors became the rulers and the conquered, the ruled. Since humans need food to live, the rulers required of the ruled to provide them with food and whatever else they wished.

But here comes the most clever of all stratagems: the division of the ruled into two groups. One group of workers is given the job of enforcement, and the other workers remain enforced workers. The enforcers are called “police,” “soldier,” “sheriff,” “deputy,” “marshal,” “bodyguard,” “security guard,” “national guard,” etc. The non-enforcers are forced into wage-labor by forbidding them free access to subsistence land. This is true from the time of recorded history. Allowing occupation of land was conditional on some kind of payment and service. At first this is called feudalism, but in a sense, feudalism still exists in the form of payment of property and other taxes to the State, and military service when required.

The ease of dividing people into enforcers and non-enforcers was dramatically demonstrated by the Stanford prison experiment by Philip Zimbardo, in which students were randomly divided into prison guards and prisoners.

What this — as well as my general independent knowledge — shows me is that people will do almost anything for a job and money. Perhaps the book by Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, 2007, captures this phenomenon as does Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolph Eichmann by the phrase the “banality of evil” — that people will sell themselves easily as slaves of others.

I have always wondered — and still do — how soldiers were recruited to fight in massive face-to-face battles, where death and the known probability of death was so extensive. I can understand the willingness of people to fight in a defensive action; but I am utterly disturbed by how easily the police and national guards comply to quell people with justifiable grievances; or even how an organized war of Americans against Americans (1861-1865) was possible.

Below is a documentary about what took place in Chicago during the August 1968 Democratic National Convention. Thousands of young people congregated in Lincoln and Grant Parks in protest against the Vietnam War. Mayor Daley ordered the police to clear the parks and stop any illegal marching, and the police brutally complied, with the national guard standing in the background.

“Totalitarianism” as understood by Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, 1958, 1968.

All abstract political terms — especially those ending in “ism” — as used by particular individuals have to be defined. Otherwise the tendency is to psittacism — talking like a parrot without understanding.

Hannah Arendt, in her book, recognized only two recent governments as being totalitarian dictatorships — that of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. And because other writers include other dictators, such as Benito Mussolini and Mao Tse-tung as being totalitarian, it helps to clarify her use of the term “totalitarian” by understanding why she explicitly refused to use this label with them.

To begin with, we are talking about dictators. And it is the policy of typical dictators to eliminate criticism and opposition through censorship, incarceration, and execution. A higher level of control is achieved through spies and a secret police, as was the case in the 19th century especially with the Russian tsar’s Okhrana.

In these respects, Mussolini was a typical dictator. She writes: “… Mussolini, who was so fond of the term “totalitarian state,” did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime11 and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule.

11 Proof of the nontotalitarian nature of the Fascist dictatorshp is the suprisingly small number and the comparatively mild sentences meted out to political offenders. During the particularly active years from 1926 to 1932, the special tribunals for political offenders pronounced 7 death sentences, 257 sentences of 10 or more years imprisonment, 1,360 under 10 years, and sentenced many more to exile;12,000, moreover, were arrested and found innocent, a procedure quite inconceivable under conditions of Nazi and Bolshevik terror. See E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police. The Technique of Control by Fear, London, 1945, pp. 51 ff. [pp. 308-9]

More surprising is Arendt’s refusal to label Mao Tse-tung’s killing of 15 million Chinese (3% of the population) in 1949 as totalitarian. She writes: ” … after the disappearance of organized opposition, there was no increase in terror, no massacre of innocent people, no category of “objective enemies,” no show trials, though a great deal of public confessions and “self-criticism,” and no outright crimes.” [p. xxvi]

So, it would seem, that the term “totalitarian” is being used not specifically for killing opponents but for killing and controlling people for some other reason.

Here I want to interject my own succinct explanation of why Hitler and Stalin killed people which would warrant for distinct labels — though “totalitarian” does not seem quite appropriate.

Hitler killed people because of his fanatical perverted eugenic program, which included exterminating races, the deformed, and the disabled. Hitler viewed his mission similarly to that of the robot, Nomad, depicted in the TV series Star Trek, whose mission was to destroy “biological infestation.”

Here is a clip:

Stalin, on the other hand, was a fanatic of a different stripe. He had an obsessive paranoia which required a rationalization by having his victims confess their “crimes.” And his mind-set was like that of the United States when it waged a preemptive war against Iraq, or the rationalization of an Israeli soldier when he shoots a Palestinian child because the child may grow up to be a terrorist. Typical dictators kill only their enemies; Stalin killed and terrorized possible enemies as well.

P.S. Hannah Arendt believed that the best studies about Hitler were by Alan Bullock, Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, 1952; and Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1944. About Stalin, Boris Souvarine, Stalin, A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 1939; and, Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 1949.

What is the same and what is different between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States?

Three things come to mind about their similarities:
1. Both support the Constitution of the United States.
2. Both support the Capitalist system.
3. Both are funded by large corporations.

Before I say anything about the differences, let me say something about these three similarities. 1. About the Constitution. Let me just say that the Swiss Constitution is better for the following reasons. First, I think it is a grave error to give such great powers to a single individual, as is given to a President or to a Prime Minister. Such persons almost invariable will work for their own benefit, their families, and their friends. As an example, just think of the activities of President Donald Trump. A single individual is also subject to bribes and threats.

A better Constitution — such as that of Switzerland — places the executive function in the hands of a council of seven individuals.

Second, the U.S. Constitution promotes Macro Democracy at all levels of government. Million vote for the President, millions vote for Senators and Representatives, millions vote for Governors, and thousands or millions vote for Mayors.

By contrast, I advocate Micro Democracy which is favored by anarchists.

2. About Capitalism. By Capitalism, I understand a political system which bars people from a free access to subsistence land. And by contrast, I view Socialism as a political system which grants people a free access to subsistence land. [I know that others view the matter differently. But when you think about it axiomatically (i.e., in terms of fundamental principles), this is the difference.]

3. As to funding. Macro Democracy requires a great amount of money for advertisement. And those with the greatest wealth (i.e., corporation) are able to contribute the most. And statistically, the candidates with the largest campaign funds tend to prevail. So both parties seek and accept corporate donations.

My stance here is to favor Micro Democracy in which funds would be useless.

Now to the differences. In reality, they are superficial and contrived. For example, there is a great fuss about voting rights. But what does it matter whether you elect a Republican Tweedle-Dee or a Democratic Tweedle-Dum.

The making of a nationalizing (i.e., centralizing) and democracy-constraining (i.e., anti-populist) U. S. Constitution

“Well, the lack of influence goes back in the United States roughly two hundred fifty years. So, we can start with the Constitution, which was established explicitly on the principle of preventing democracy. There wasn’t any secret about it. In fact, the major scholarly study on the Constitutional Convention, by Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law professor, is called The Framers’ Coup, and it’s about the coup against democracy by the Framers.

The theme of the of the founders was expressed quite well by John Jay, who was the first Supreme Court chief justice: “those who own the country ought to govern it.” That’s what we see today: those who own the country have succeeded in governing it.”

Noam Chomsky, Noam Chomsky: The Elites Are Fighting a Vicious Class War All the Time, Jacobin, June 10, 2021.