The Hot Air Machine

          WHEN I first sat down to type up this article, I was a bit confused on the manner in which I should begin. This has happened once or twice before. While something usually comes to me, the best remedy – which I am going to be using now – is to simply jump right into the main idea. No introductory dilly-dallying.           Both welfare and foreign aid have been hot topics in recent years. The ever-leftward Democrats have been calling for welfarist initiatives such as Medicare-for-All and outright expansions of the welfare state. The Trump administration was defined by a platform bitterly opposed to international aid , which lead to the usual squealing of “nativism” and (somehow) “fascism”. To a certain extent, it seems as if most political commentators and the citizenry see these two topics as distinct; welfare is domestic policy, foreign aid is foreign policy. However, what I want to propose in this art...

  DEMOCRACY , oh how we love it! Practically everyone knows this word, especially in the West. Democracy is synonymous with freedom, and the form of government common in the West is referred to as “liberal democracy” . In America, we are told we live in a representative democracy (i.e., a republic) and this is what makes us awesome. The American Left rallies behind the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Socialists of America. It seems everyone acknowledges that democracy is cool. Rule by the people, as it literally means in Greek, is the most logical because every individual has their rights, and every individual deserves their voice in government. Even from a collectivist perspective, the whole collective – which “the people”, a collective noun, represents – deserves to be involved in matters of administration/political deliberation. However, not everyone is on board with this political system, to many’s surprise. Indeed, democracy has been criticized for as long as it has ex...