
How big philanthropy undermines democracy (2013) - alexanderdmitri
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/plutocrats-at-work-how-big-philanthropy-undermines-democracy
======
deogeo
It's very telling that those Parent Trigger laws provide for converting a
school _to_ a charter school, but _not_ back to a regular school.

Once the Market gets hold of a formerly public institution, it doesn't like to
give it back.

------
TomMarius
Who cares about democracy? I thought the goal is not to have democracy but to
be free as much as possible while having a positive society, which is best
achieved by _limited_ democracy (and that might or might not be the case
today).

~~~
petermcneeley
You should watch "The Trap" by Adam Curtis. Basically what you are describing
is called Negative Liberty and it is a very particular narrow and limiting
type of freedom. [https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-
trap/](https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-trap/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty)

~~~
TomMarius
That isn't what I meant. I wanted to say that I feel like people are focusing
on democracy for the sake of having democracy instead of using it as just one
tool to achieve maximum freedom like it was supposed to.

~~~
petermcneeley
Yes but "achieve maximum freedom" is a negative liberty concept. Positive
liberty is more like parentalism which limits freedom to achieve self-mastery.

~~~
TomMarius
For this reason I specifically said "while having a positive society". Not
that I don't agree (or disagree) but I don't want to argue about this at all.
The point is that we have democracy instead of absolutism to have freedom, not
to have democracy.

