{"id":35,"date":"2007-04-04T13:16:35","date_gmt":"2007-04-04T03:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/?p=35"},"modified":"2007-04-04T13:16:35","modified_gmt":"2007-04-04T03:16:35","slug":"democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/?p=35","title":{"rendered":"Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whilst listening to an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.groklaw.net\/article.php?story=20070403114157109\">interview with Richard Stallman<\/a> today, he succinctly articulated something that I have believed for a long time:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The purpose of democracy is to make sure that wealthy people cannot have influence proportional to their wealth.  And if they do have more influence than you or I, that means democracy is failing. The laws that they obtain in this way have no moral authority, but they have the capability of doing harm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>By being party to certain treaties, we in Australia are directly affected by the USA&#8217;s flawed political system.\u00c2\u00a0 Unless we learn to stand up to it a little better, like France and Canada for example, we are really going to start to feel the pain. More than we currently do from their unsupportable foreign policy&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whilst listening to an interview with Richard Stallman today, he succinctly articulated something that I have believed for a long time: The purpose of democracy is to make sure that wealthy people cannot have influence proportional to their wealth. And &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/?p=35\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helms-deep.net\/~rwh\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}