Racial harmony and prosperity in guyana

Here's another view that most people haven't covered as regards Guyana.

I think that most would agree that the major tension between the two groups plays out at the political level and not on the grassroots level. Politics fosters the continuance of these "group views" because it is inherently collectivist. Politics sees parliamentary voting blocks composed of groups......it collects individuals into blocks of similar interest. The very system of democracy perpetuates the friction that has existed since so long ago.

Benjamin Franklin once said that democracy was two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for dinner.

Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."

Let's cut right to the bone here. Democracy is popularity. Populism is LESS likely to abridge people's rights as often as a monarch or a dictator and will generally unseat anyone who isn't popular.

I imagine that in a nation where everyone has a common heritage and race and religion etc, The evils of democracy are less visible.

This melts away in a multi-ethnic system. If you can see a block of people taking away your rights and they are of a different color from you .....it's perceived differently. I don't know that there is any way to overcome this other than power sharing, because only then would people realize that ALL the politicians were abridging their rights......so they can be dissatisfied with all of them. But power sharing would be undemocratic now wouldn't it? The most popular candidate and/or party should have the most power shouldn't he/they?

Do you see the catch-22 situation here? Democracy is the "least worst" and what is popular may sometimes be the least evil but the way it is done with ethnically-based parties perpetuates feelings and social dynamics that threaten peace and democracy.

What's the solution? I think it would go a long way for the individual to be brought back into politics.

Democracy works best when it has much less power to abridge the rights of individuals or give special treatment to one group of individuals over another.

Democracy can even be GREAT when there are codified RIGHTS which aren't abridged by the government.

Government works best when is has less power in general.

Would someone mistrust the dominant ethnic group that had control of government if government had little or no power to intervene in his life against his own will?

The very essence of government that makes groups covet it and other groups despise it is its virtual monopoly on the use of coercive power to enforce popular laws, tax money and shape society through legislation.

If racial relations are better on the person-to-person societal level than on a governmental level, find things that the government doesn't need to be doing and let other consensual entities in society like charities and businesses take over. If there is a demand for the particular service, then they will find a way to get funding. If the market finds no use for the services, then maybe government shouldn't be doing them in the first place.

For those who love and have more faith in government and its power to wield coercive force on others, your faith in government may yield more efficient government someday but in the meantime stop expecting racial harmony.

The path to prosperity in Guyana isn't more planning and combating poverty. Government planning means sub planting the plans of a bureaucrat's over the plans of an individual. Combating poverty just redistributes wealth..often from one GROUP to another. It is, in my opinion, fallacious to expect people of different races to choose to get along with each other via the coercive power of the state.

The path to prosperity for Guyana is wealth creation (not poverty alleviation) and individual rights. The most prosperous places have few natural resources and many rights and freedoms! Hong Kong, Singapore, the cayman islands and others were forced by scarcity to come up with other ways to create wealth and they did so out of thin air (!) by codifying more rights and exercising less government power to coerce and tax.

Have you ever thought that creating a free and prosperous Guyana meant less government and less laws and less and less and less of most things that government cooks up?

Less really is more.

Free the individual.