Last Straw

This is the first in a new series tracking people who find the whole democracy thing inconvenient¹ and would rather those pesky citizens just shut the $%!@ up so they can get on with transferring the world’s wealth from the hands of the many into the hands of those who are actually entitled to it, the few.²

Jenni McManus is editor for the The Independent, a New Zealand-based business weekly, and here she is expounding her idea of democracy and how the incoming Prime Minister of New Zealand should interpret his mandate:

If forced to choose between breaking election promises and the country’s economic survival, voters’ intentions are clear. Key wasn’t elected simply to implement his manifesto but to manage and lead the economy out of the crisis.

Translation:

We have our Pearl Harbour Mr Prime Minister so the choice between a small attack on New Zealand’s wealth and a full out assault to transfer every ounce we can into the hands of few is clear. Don’t worry about those pesky voters and their silly ideas about democracy, my psychic abilities tell me that their “mood for change” is that they actually want to be fucked up the ass.

She fills out her credentials by offering this piece of advice to the incoming Prime Minister from one of the ultimate despisers of democracy, Roger Douglas, writing in his 1993 book ominously titled Unfinished Business:

Do not try to advance a step at a time. Define your objectives clearly and move towards them in quantum leaps. Otherwise the interest groups will have time to mobilise and drag you down.

1. Well, in actual fact, these people love democracy, at least by their definition of the word. They see democracy as James Madison wanted it to be, speaking at the secret debates of U.S. constitutional convention in 1787, as a means to produce governments that will “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” i.e. to protect those with property from those without. For the purposes of this series I am using a more popular definition: that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. [↩]
2. They don’t actually say this is their objective but even those of them with good intentions are so blinded by their ideology that they just don’t care if this is the outcome. [↩]