> Putting aside specific policy questions, I doubt Mill thought that any actual democracy would enable people to get _all_ of what they want. Anyway, any failure on the part of our government to provide people with what they want can be attributed in large part to the often conflicting and suboptimal preferences of individual political agents (e.g. someone might wish they had health care but also want a flat tax, even though the desire for the latter conflicts with the former and is probably an irrational preference). How do we (i.e. anyone to the left of Dick Cheney) change such irrational preferences? Beats me. It's comments like this that have made me come to doubt whether it is worth engaging with you. You start by attributing to me an interpretation of Mill that I did not state, do not believe, and is quite irrelevant to the mater at hand,m then go on to offer a "blame the victim" explanation of the failure of our democracy to deliver that is so removed from politica
l reality that it's hard to know where to start correcting it. What have you been doing on this list these several years without having learned anything? jks
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030324/1a61bda0/attachment.htm>