SomeLinesHitYouLikeATonOf
BricksVille
Historian Henry Yu had an excellent Op-Ed in the VSun yesterday about 23 'children playing' signs that will no longer be required along the soon-to-be car-free section of Point Grey Road.
It was an interesting piece, and it had me thinking about how much Knight Street is still neither child nor bike friendly.
And then, near the bottom of the piece, out of nowhere, came the following:
"...Democracy does not require an equal distribution of wealth among all citizens. But it does require that great wealth not become synonymous with unchecked power..."
Couldn't agree more.
In fact, it strikes me as a motto of reasonableness to aspire to in all realms, including the political.
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Understanding The Problem
2 hours ago
1 comment:
Not wealth, nor anything else, can be un-checked in a democracy, which has been able to function even when the franchise was limited to white landowners of a certain age and still carries on despite continuing age discrimination and academic-ad nauseam controversies around the very nature of representation (like unequal riding populations, "wasted votes" in our Single-Member-Plurality system and "whipped" parliamentary votes). While all that stuff is healthy debate, accountability with real consequences is the essence of democracy, the neglect of which makes courts, legal, quasi-legal or of public opinion, news media and other avenues of accountability culpable. We shouldn't need "special prosecutors" to tell us that perceived conflicts of interest and lying are firing offences or to be told that biased political journalism should be rejected out of hand. Currently great wealth is indeed synonymous with unchecked power; it's the "unchecked" part that's undemocratic.
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