All of One Piece By Donnel Jones, August 1, 2003	Home   Search   Forum   Terms

Amartya Sen, India's Nobel laureate economist, reassures skeptics that democracy is the best form of government suited for economic growth.

Apparently there are a number of people in India who are skeptical about democracy. I have no idea why this might be so, knowing very little about the place, beyond the clichés of post-colonial denial of what is virtuous and good in Western culture. After all, if it colonized and deracinated peoples and hurled them, as literal pieces of property, to other parts of the globe, Western Civ. can't be that great.

Leaving aside the poison of "white guilt," something I must write about more extensively elsewhere, a dismissal of democracy won't find justification in past grievances. Nor, for that matter, the idea that democracy is, after all is said and done, ultimately unsuitable for such an ancient people. Except that the British claimed the same thing when not wanting to let go of its crown jewel.

Mr. Sen's defense of democracy is summed up this way:

He suggested instead that a representative political system was as much important as economic and social development and each type of human freedom, in fact, led to other freedoms.

Which Victor Davis Hanson makes explicit in his groundbreaking work, Carnage and Culture, where he expounds the virtues of democracy—strong civic life, the rule of law, rights of the individual, trial by jury, civic audit of the military, free markets, and a capacity for nurturing innovation, and how they are all related to having made the West a dominant leader in military and economic spheres—virtues and accomplishments by no means limited to the West in the world today.

Democracy is something you grow, nurture, yet also leave alone and let happen once the right institutions are in place, rather than engineering the thinking of others, through heavy state control, to justify the institutions as an end in themselves.

To see democracy as a piece of machinery unrelated to economic growth is to miss the point of both democracy and a healthy economy. No one's saying bad things don't happen to economies in democracies. Yet one has still to point to an autocratically controlled economy that rivals that of even a moderately sized democracy's. Or, to the degree China continues to be a rising economic power, democracy will grow in tandem.

Though you do meet people who honestly believe that if the U.S. lifted its embargo against Cuba that nation's economy would flourish under radical socialism. I, for one, am against the embargo for reasons supporting human freedom. The argument is well- rehearsed by now and that is, opening up Cuba to free markets will eventually topple its authoritarian regime.

A free market has a life of its own. Its brings with it a whole different way of thinking that is inextricable from the other virtues in democracy. Cuba without an embargo would not be getting a "piece" of a machine called "trade." It would be getting a different way of thinking

For Castro, that's positively dangerous and he's confident he could prevent it from happening if the embargo were raised. For now, the embargo is a useful tool to flay the Americans with. For the meantime we just have to wait.