Democracy is the target of contempt of libertarians, anarchists and other freedom minded people, always has been.

People say democracy doesn't work; the story of the two wolves and the sheep; the horror stories of what happens when votes are given to the stupid and the evil; the tales of all the failures that have occurred in human history under democracy.

The poverty, the war, the hunger. All the bad stuff.

The consensus has always been that democracy doesn't work.

Well, I'm here to tell you otherwise:

Democracy works perfectly. Just as intended, as a matter of fact.

My problem with the idea that democracy doesn't work is that it works under the assumption that democracy was ever even supposed to be a noble idea of freedom and well being that gives "power to the people". And the failure to produce this result means that the system has failed.

Had this been the case, democracy would never have been implemented anywhere in the first place. No government would function under a democracy if democracy was ever intended to give the people power over their politicians.

When law makers pass stupid laws, when politicians make huge bank by robbing their citizens blind, when countries go to tax payer funded wars, it's not a failed democracy at work. It's democracy at work. The system is working exactly as intended.

The concept that democracy has failed gives democracy too much credit, and that's my problem with it. The Soviet Union does not represent a failed version of socialism, it represents the very essence of socialism. Venezuela didn't fail at socialism, it excelled at socialism.

When people give these broken ideologies too much credit, it breathes more life into the illusion that the ideologies themselves are not at fault, and somehow, someway, the perfect model of that ideology is just around the corner. We just need to survive without food a little more. Tighten our belts just a little more.

It's time we start looking at ideologies, policies, movements, et cetera for what they are, not what they are marketed as.

If I ask you to give me money in exchange of apples and time and time again give you tomatoes, there comes a time when you should stop listening to me when I say that it's the thought that counts.

With most everything else, we measure the value of things by what is the value they provide. But for some reason this is not the case with ideologies. We always hold on these utopian ideas of what the perfect manifestation of the perfect implementation of the perfect ideology would theoretically be, and we fail to see what the ideologies actually do in practice. It's the "Well, that's not true whatever" fallacy.

Democracy does work and it always has worked. Even when you and your family suffer and the fruit of your labour is used to fund forms of violence that you yourself do not condone.

It's just that democracy was never about you.

Image source: 1