At least that’s the only conclusion that I can draw from this Rasmussen poll:
A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 29% of voters favor nationalizing the oil industry. Just 47% are opposed and 24% are not sure.
The survey found that a plurality of Democrats (37%) believe the oil industry should be nationalized. Just 32% of voters in Barack Obama’s party disagree with that approach. Republicans oppose nationalizing the oil industry by a 66% to 16% margin. Unaffiliated voters are opposed by a 47% to 33% margin.
I’m not sure which part of this is more depressing. The fact the nearly 1/3 of the American public apparently believe that Soviet-style nationalization is a good idea notwithstanding 75 years of evidence to the contrary, or the fact that nearly 1/4 of the populace is too uninformed and/or lazy to even have an opinion on the matter.
It’s days like this that make me think that democracy is one of those things that works well in theory, but falls apart in practice.
H/T: QandO
June 16th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Democracy doesn’t even look good in theory. Its hopelessly inefficient and prone to all the disasters of mob rule. The genius of democracy though, is that it contains safety valves not present in any other system that has been tried on the nation-state scale.
Democracy can be made to work acceptably well, _IF_ the population are well educated, well informed, and efforts are made to curb policy driven by destructive emotions like fear, greed and hatred, and power is kept accountable to the people instead of special interest groups such as religions and corporations. Sadly, the USA has been sprinting in the opposite direction of all of these provisos for decades, and now the whole world is paying the price.
June 16th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Even Homer Simpson said, “When are people going to learn? Democracy doesn’t work.”
June 16th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Seems low to me.
June 16th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
It seems that H.L. Mencken had it right after all.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
…..”A republic if you can keep it.”
June 17th, 2008 at 10:40 am
xoc: That’s why we don’t have a democracy. The Founders wanted a democracy about as much as they wanted a monarchy– they gave us a Republic. One thing that *nobody* seems to remember anymore is that the United States is not ONE country– we’re fifty little countries that happen to be closely affiliated. When people called the EU the “United States of Europe,” they were closer to the truth than they might have imagined.