There isn’t a magic bullet or a catch all solution to every country’s governing needs. Each country has its own form of government with its own quirks and particularities. No government is perfect – they all have their problems – even our own. I realize that by saying this I’m committing an act of supreme heresy against The American Religion, but the truth must be told: democracy is not always the answer.

I imagine I just lost about half of my readers with that statement, but it had to be said.

To most people, you either support democracy or you don’t. You support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because you support democracy. You refuse to work with dictators because you support democracy. You support the troops because you support democracy. America is a republic that elects its leaders via democracy. You just aren’t a good American if you don’t support democracy – but those arguments are completely nonsensical.

Democracy is a tool. It’s a system. It’s a method. It’s a technique. I’m quite capable of supporting my government without blindly and evangelically spreading democracy to all corners of the globe. I can choose to support or not support the war in Iraq regardless of how I feel about its system of government. I support our troops because they serve and defend this country, its people, and its interests – and I do it all without giving a damn one way or the other about how other countries choose to run themselves because that choice has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I’m a good American.

Americans do not like to admit this fundamental truth. We love the republic because it works for us. We pioneered the push for modern democracy. We’ve made it our mission in life to spread its virtues to the rest of the world. We’ve become infatuated with it. We’ve romanticized it. We’ve fought and bled for it. We worship at the alter of democracy and we sing its praises. To Americans, democracy is both our birthright and our legacy.

My friends, our republic was not created simply because the founding fathers loved democracy and wanted to see it in action. They were trying to solve real problems with real solutions that evolved into the system that we know today – democracy was not The Answer™ then and it is not The Answer™ today. Our founding fathers debated everything from the role of government to the unity of states. We weren’t even really sure we even wanted a democracy at all.

Alexander Hamilton lead a group of politicians who offered the crown of the American monarchy to Prince Henry of Prussia. If it hadn’t taken months to cross the Atlantic and given them time to change their minds, history would have turned out very differently. The first government that reigned over the newly independent United States of America, one might recall, was not that which was established by the Constitution, but rather one laid out by the Articles of Confederation. We were not, at first, a republic at all. For six years we were a federation of independent states ruled by an ineffectual system of super-majority votes that was drowning in debt and couldn’t get anything done.

For the record, the first President of the United States was John Hanson.

All governments exist because there are certain problems each society faces that it simply can’t handle without a public body coming up with solutions, making decisions, and then translating those decisions into organized action that addresses society’s needs. Every society is different. Every society faces different problems. Every society favors different solutions. Every society faces different resistance to its leadership. Every society reacts differently to both authority and chaos.

There is tremendous strength in democracy. Discourse and debate slow the decision making process thereby encouraging more scrutiny and generally leading to better considered laws. Because every decision requires a majority vote, it becomes almost impossible for a minority to oppress the majority. Internal disagreement tends to lead to the moderation of radicals that choose to work within the system if they want to get things done. Democracies bow to the will of the people and government policies that are unpopular get reversed. If the military and law enforcement support the government, democracies can be quite stable in times of political turmoil.

Democracies are not perfect, however. Basic freedoms that are typically associated with them, like the ability to travel without papers, restrictions on law enforcement, and guaranteeing the right to assemble result in higher rate of crime and civil unrest. Democracies are subject to sudden and drastic changes in the style and direction of government as various factions trade control. These shifts can sometimes result in dramatic differences, abruptly changing a state from capitalist to socialist, realigning its foreign relations, or even result in the end of the government entirely.

Direct democracy has no guarantees against the tyranny of the majority and as such, minorities can just as easily be treated as second class citizens. Democracy does not guarantee a free market, civil liberties, women’s rights, or even that a country will respect its neighbors.

Dictatorships, on the other hand, are not inherently evil. While democracy is (with two major exceptions) mostly a modern invention, dictatorships have been with us since the dawn of civilization. The progress of the last 250 years of democracy would not have been possible without the last 5750 years of monarchs, emperors, kings, warlords, generals, and chieftains.

They’ve worked so long because they work so well. They’re simple, they’re effective, and they have some major advantages. The biggest advantage of a dictatorship is a lack of bickering over policy issues. One person sets the rules, everyone else follows. This means the system is incredibly quick at responding to problems as they occur. It also means there’s less criticism of the leadership, leading to a greater legitimacy and loyalty among the average man on the street. There’s no political push back when it comes to limiting the rights of the innocent to crack down on those who would abuse them.

The other major advantage is stability. An election will never change the government’s response to an issue in a dictatorship. Political protests do not occur, nor do they turn into riots. As long as the leader lives, the underlying philosophy of the state does not change – a corrupt and greedy dictator does not nationalize the multinational corporations that keep him in power. A religious fanatic won’t suddenly liberalize a nation only to crack down on his people in a series of bloody raids a few years later. More reasonable leaders like Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf or China’s Hu Jintao can reasonably be counted on to consistently act in their nation’s best interests without risking anything by rocking the boat.

There are places in the world (and America is not one of those places) where what the people really need, more than anything else, is to stop arguing amongst themselves and ripping their country apart. Democracies only really work when people agree to stop fighting and take their fights to the ballot box. Dictatorships are really good at quelling civil unrest, reducing crime, and controlling the way a country functions.

The choice between a democracy and a dictatorship isn’t good versus evil – there is a real utility to picking one over the other. Likewise, a democratic but oppressive and belligerent Iran is not necessarily a better place than an autocratic but progressive and moderate Jordan, a country that is consistently rated as having one of the best human rights records in the middle east. Why? Because they’re just systems. They’re tools. And like any tool, they are neither good nor evil – they’re merely extensions of the people who use them.

When we discuss government types in this country, there is a bias that seriously harms this nation’s foreign policy. We are a nation obsessed. We are a nation blinded by the religion of democracy. We can’t let a certain type of government mislead us into supporting democracies that work against the American people or prevent us from working with friends simply because their bureaucracy doesn’t match our own. Methods do matter. Human rights abuses are totally unacceptable, but life, liberty, and freedom are not confined to democracy. Oppression, tyranny, and hostility are not the sole domain of the dictatorship.

We can’t be afraid to confront our enemies, just because they are democracies. We can’t insist others convert to our ways as a condition of friendship. We can’t abandon our allies simply because they aren’t cast in our own image. We must reach out to and engage with the international community, regardless of their choice in governments.

We have to be rational, realistic, practical people – and part of that means accepting that just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s evil.

Author’s note: Please bear with me while I experiment with the format of this column until I find a way of doing this that I like. I’ve received a number of comments on the section, some good, some bad, some mixed. I’m not ready to give up on it, but I’m definitely trying to improve on the idea. As always, if you have any feedback about the new column or the site or anything at all, my inbox is always open. I’m probably going to keep playing with it until I’m genuinely happy with it.

The Friday News Weekly Round Up: The 10 most interesting news stories I’ve seen this week.

1) Al Franken Reads the 4th Amendment to Justice Department Official

Liberal or conservative, you have to chuckle and hand it to Al Franken on this one. While discussing the wiretaps authorized by the PATRIOT Act, Franken reads the Fourth Amendment which says, in plain English, the roving wiretaps that it authorizes are unconstitutional. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, you have to admit the Constitution is cut and dry on this one.

2) The Most Corrupt Members Of Congress

Another list of the most corrupt members of Congress was released this week. Our good friend Charlie Rangel is, of course, smack in the middle of it. If you’re counting, I’ve been running this segment for four weeks now and Rangel’s corruption is batting 1000.

3) Senate, House Health-Care Legislation: Side-by-Side Comparison

If you’re interested in how the health care reform bill is shaping up and how the Baucus Bill is different from HR3200, this article is a good place to start.

4) Obama’s Nontax Tax

The Wall Street Journal is slowly echoing every point I’ve said about the health care reform bill. This particular piece doesn’t just explain how health care reform intends to increase our taxes, it gives a startling insight into President Obama’s way of thinking.

5) Dem Campaign Anxiety: Vulnerables Say They Lack Cover From Pelosi

In news that surprises absolutely no one, when you push an extremist agenda in Congress, mainstream America tends to disprove. I would add one thing to this story: The longer this fight lasts, the worse this problem will get.

6) Indiana Court Rejects Same-Sex Divorce

On one hand, I can understand the logic: If you aren’t legally married, there’s no point in getting legally divorced. On the other hand: LOLWUT?

7) Half a Ton of Uranium — and a Long Flight

This is the fascinating story of how American officials spirited away dozens of warheads worth of uranium out of Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

8) Hi-Ho, the Derry-O

Michele Obama closed down several streets and shut down a farmer’s market before security teams swept through it with bomb sniffing dogs and posting sentries around it – so that she could buy some kale. Still no word on how we’re going to reduce the deficit.

9) ‘I Did Not Sign Up for This,’ Paterson Says

My heart bleeds for Mr. Paterson. He just wanted to be a Senator, now his life is ruined and he is stuck as a lowly governor of one of the wealthiest states of the union.

10) Huckabee Wins Values Voter Straw Poll

I think my exact reaction to this story was, “I’d rather vote for Obama.” Seriously, if the Republican alternative to secular socialism is religious socialism, the party should just roll over and die.

There you have it, folks. Have a wonderful weekend and remember to email, comment, or tweet me if you have anything you’d like to share.

Today the Federal Communications Commission’s Chairman, Julius Genachowski, announced in a speech at the Brookings Institution that it will formalize a set of policies that have evolved as a result of precedent established with individual rulings that will amount to the creation and enforcement of net neutrality. While I’m neither a fan of the FCC nor the Obama administration, I’d like to take a moment to praise and thank President Obama, Mr. Genachowski, and the FCC for following through with their commitment to net neutrality.

For those who don’t know, net neutrality is something of a buzzword used to describe a series of policies that ensure internet service providers – like Comcast, Time Warner, ATT, Cox, etc – don’t stop users (that’s you) from reaching content providers (like me, or google, or any other internet service) that they don’t necessarily approve of. The rules would prevent your internet service provider from reducing your speed to a crawl when you try to download something, blocking a web site critical of their company, stopping you from looking at a controversial site, watching movies online instead of the cable TV they provide which competes with it, censoring free speech, or doing anything else which interferes with the free flowing of information and services.

Net neutrality is important because large internet providers (Comcast in particular, but they’ve all toyed with the idea) have, in the past, attempted to block certain content – especially streaming movies (think YouTube and Hulu), peer-to-peer traffic (vital to anyone who’s ever downloaded a game or a service pack update or anything else), and newsgroups (which are basically message boards). This wouldn’t be a very big deal if competition existed, you could simply go to a provider that didn’t block those services, but, as I’ve pointed out before, cable companies and broad band providers are natural monopolies. They don’t operate in the same world of supply and demand that the free market system needs to properly self-regulate.

Ultimately, that means that these providers are gatekeepers. They can, if they so choose, tell you what you’re allowed to see, when you’re allowed to see it, how they want you to see it. Such censorship is chilling on free speech, violates consumer’s rights, and ruinous to businesses that depend on the internet to reach their targets – all without providing any real benefit to the companies that seek to impose it.

Net neutrality ensures that internet service providers stay, well, neutral. The rules will – or should – prevent them from getting involved in censorship. Fights between pirates and record labels, for instance, won’t result in a provider deciding to throttle entire transfer protocols on a given network. Fights over what is and isn’t obscenity won’t mean your discussion board on model trains gets closed down.

The bottom line, even if you don’t understand the technical issues, is that net neutrality is a good thing. It is a good thing for freedom of expression and freedom of information. It is a good thing for businesses that depend on the internet to engage their consumers. It’s a good thing for due process and the law. It’s a good thing for the internet providers because they won’t be asked to step in by those who have a problem with their customers.

So far, net neutrality has failed to make any headway in congress. The last time it was up for a committee vote in the Senate earlier this year, it went 11-11 and died without reaching the floor. The administration’s use of the powers already granted to the FCC and the creation of new guidelines to help ensure net neutrality is a step in the right direction until real legislation can be passed and implemented. Unfortunately, the FCC can only do so much until a real bill is passed. While the FCC has indicated that it would like to do so, these rules probably won’t extend to wireless internet providers used by cell phones or dial-up and DSL providers.

While these regulations don’t solve all of the problems associated with net neutrality, this is definitely a step in the right direction and regardless of all the other things we disagree on, the Obama administration is doing the right thing here.

This is the third installment of my new weekly news round up column and – not surprisingly – the third week in a row that the health care reform debate and Cheating Charlie Rangel take center stage.

The longer the health care debate goes on, the uglier and messier things get for the Democrats who are pushing it. For that reason, I’d like to thank Senator Max Baucus (D) of Montana for finally generating some bipartisan support with his own health care reform plan. Both sides agree: they hate it. Republicans, including the so-called moderate Gang of Six, balk at numerous problems with the bill including mandated coverage, a 35% tax on existing benefits, reimbursement costs, and immigration and abortion concerns. Democrats hate the plan because it drops the public option, it’s tax measures cut too far down the social latter, and that it doesn’t provide all the funding for other projects such as Medicare and Medicaid that other options do.

With the help of superstars like Charlie Rangel, Democrats now comprise majority of “most corrupt in Congress” list. His problems keep adding up as more and more stories about unreported rental property income come out. I think Richard Cohen summed it pretty well in his editorial in the Washington Post on Tuesday. Rangel hasn’t ended the corruption he was first elected to stop – he’s joined it.

On the other side of the isle, in his own little world of controversy lives Joe Wilson. He’s been doing a lot of fund raising of his own, though his is slightly more legal. After shouting “you lie!” during Obama’s speech, the reports of his campaign contributions have come one after the other. Less than 48 hours after the outburst, he’d raised $750,000. As of today, he’s made $1.8 million.

Wilson’s story seems to fit rather nicely with another narrative that’s been pushed this week about the state of public discourse in this country. Let’s make this very clear: In a democracy, dissent is your civic duty. So why do we hear our leaders equating dissent with racism or claiming that the KKK is coming back, or making ridiculous claims about assassination?

Why does it seem like conservatives see dissent as free speech and liberals see it as a threat to our nation?

In economic news, we seem to have forgotten that we live in a global environment and protectionism doesn’t work any more (if it ever did). Concessions by the Obama administration to union interests are sparking trouble with China and our buy American mojo seems to be working out real well with Canada. Meanwhile we seem to be destined to repeat history, what with credit swaps on the rise and mortgage companies playing fast and loose with the payments of stupid people again – all while we haven’t fully recovered from the last time they pulled these stunts. There is some sanity out there though in the form of the non-partisan GAO that reported last week that the best thing the government could do for the banking industry right now is to privatize Fannie and Freddie.

Other Interesting Stories:
·Incoming Tokyo Government Threatens Split With US
·Afghans Question What Democracy Has Done For Them
·Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law
· Santorum Reportedly Mulling White House Bid

Just remember not to worry too much about all the gloomy headlines. There’s at least one this week that sounds … pretty good.

The “self-funding” health care bill (you know, the one that promises to tax your health insurance benefits, tax employers another 8% of their total payroll expenses, and burden the self-employed and contractors with another 2.5% income tax) is going to be nothing less than a modern day miracle. Why, you ask? Because almost half of the money allocated to it will come from savings realized from making Medicare and Medicare more efficient. These savings (which, according to all my sources, cannot be realized if we don’t move forward with this bill) will amount to cutting 7.6% of the combined Medicare and Medicaid budgets.

I’m no business expert (I have only owned one, operated another, and saved two more) but my gut tells me slashing organization-wide operating expenses by more than 7% just doesn’t happen without some very serious shake-ups. It might just be my conservative nature. Then again, I might also be paranoid after Medicare’s Board of Trustees announced in last year’s annual report that its hospital trust fund would be bankrupt in 2017. I might be a bit cynical since Medicare is rather notorious for price fixing and then paying doctors and hospitals only a fraction of what a procedure is worth. I might be slightly confused by the fact that Medicaid’s budget isn’t exactly a federal program and that states are forced to share in the burden of it’s budgeting.

Okay, so I’m more than a little confused. Follow me on this and maybe someone will be able to help clear this up. Medicare and Medicaid costs are spiraling out of control. The budget can’t keep up with those costs. The programs, today, pay far less money for services received than the free market would normally dictate. The federal government doesn’t control even half of the Medicaid budget.

… but we’re going to cut 7.6% of the budget for those programs in “savings.”

I don’t get it. I honestly don’t. I can’t understand it. If I understood what you were proposing to me, I would shut up. If you could point to the programs and say, “Okay, this is going. This we’re going to stop offering to people making X amount a year. We’re going to retire these planes from service. We’re going to move everyone to a new office. We’re going to cut payments for Y. We’re going to…”

See, if you could say that, I’d get it. I would be able to say, “somewhere there’s a plan for all of this.” But I can’t, because there isn’t a plan on God’s green earth that could possibly make the budget fairies come down from the moon and make those numbers work. I went looking for it in the text of the bill, only to find this. It’s an exact quote from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s (they’re the ones who’ve authored HR3200) website. According to them, HR3200:

Expands Medicaid. Individuals and families with incomes at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty level will be eligible for an expanded and improved Medicaid program. Recognizing the budget challenges in many states, this expansion will be fully federally financed. To improve provider participation in this vital safety net – particularly for low‐income children, individuals with disabilities and people with mental illnesses – reimbursement rates for primary care services will be increased with new federal funding.

Improves Medicare. Senior citizens and people with disabilities will benefit from provisions that fill the donut hole over time in the Part D drug program, eliminate cost-sharing for preventive services, improve the low-income subsidy programs in Medicare, fix physician payments, and make other program improvements. The bill will also address future fiscal challenges by improving payment accuracy, encouraging delivery system reforms and extending solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund.

It boggles the mind. Democrats are telling us that they’re going to secure almost $450 billion by defunding Medicare and Medicaid while federally financing an expanded Medicare that covers more people, increases the amounts paid for services, increases subsides to low income earners, and pouring more money into the Medicare trust fund.

It. Won’t. Happen.

There is just no way. That logic is absolutely insane. The people who push it are either liars, retarded, or complete whack jobs. It should be painfully obvious to everyone that their plan won’t work. You don’t save money by spending money. The world just doesn’t work that way.

Here is my challenge to the people who claim HR3200 will be self-funding: Assuming the bill only costs $900 billion, itemize the various plans you have for funding the project and outline exactly how this bill will be paid for. For extra credit, explain to me why these cost-saving measures can only be made by passing HR3200 or why you’ve decided to squander tax payer dollars by ignoring these fixes until now.