Unfounded criticism

While we generally prefer to let slander and libel run their course rather than to legitimize it by taking the time to respond to it, the recent flood of criticism combined with your plaintive e-mail messages have convinced us that we must respond this time. It seems that the Company has been trying to turn public opinion against us by trying to claim that our Board of Dictators amounts to one-party rule. Before responding to this claim we will take some time to understand what it means, and why the Company would bother to make this assertion.

In a pure democracy, the state is run by each and every citizen. This means that each citizen is tasked with helping to make each decision that the state needs to make. If N is the number of citizens in the state, this means that there are N parties required for deciding the fate of the state, each with with their own (possibly conflicting) interests in mind. For small values of N (2, for instance) this is not a problem, but for higher numbers of N it becomes an extremely unwieldy form of government.

For this reason the founders of the United States decided against pure democracy and opted instead for a representative democracy, or a republic. In a republic, groups of citizens choose individuals to represent their interests, then let those representatives make decisions for them. If there are N citizens and M representatives (with M<<N, where "<<" means "much less than"), then this republican government is equivalent to an M-party system. Because M is much smaller than N, this system is clearly more manageable than a pure democracy, and as long as M is not one this system still allows the people to influence the decisions of the state.

Our founding fathers didn't want it to happen, but soon after the US was formed, political parties began to form. The reason for this is simple. Even with relatively small M, reaching a consensus is very difficult. Imagine trying to get 20 people with differing tastes to agree on a restaurant for dinner. The solution our politicians decided on was political parties. Instead of each individual representing his or her own beliefs, the representatives choose a political party and accept its ideology. Now, instead of M parties, we have a P-party system, where once again, P<<M. Consensus can be reached much more easily, and citizens still get a choice of which party represents them. Unfortunately, it also limits the individual citizen's control over the state, as he or she is forced to choose among groups of policies rather than individual policies.

Some states have taken this one step further and said that only one party will participate in the government of the state. The Communist Party and the Nazi Party are two prominent examples, both of which tend to oppress the people while telling them what is best for them. This is the notorious one-party system, and it is not generally good for the individual citizens as it removes their power to choose.

Even when a single party is mostly good, letting it have free reign often has undesirable consequences. The more extreme elements of the party begin to take control, and since there is no opposition, their extreme ideas take root. Party members propose ideas haphazardly and are not forced to evaluate them or debate them. Since all of their peers are members of their party, they simply accept each others' ideas. This is not the system of checks and balances that the founding fathers had in mind. Someone should at least be the devil's advocate.

The GNU Public Dictatorship and its Board of Dictators is clearly NOT a one-party system. Craig, Juliana, and I each represent differing points of view about how a dictatorship should be run, and before we act we debate the pluses and minuses of all of our actions. It should be obvious to any neutral observer that it is at least a three-party system, which is certainly better than the two-party system prevalent in US politics. We are also still accepting applications for membership, which could potentially increase the number of parties in the system. The Company wants you to overlook their own aspirations to one-party rule by trying to redefine the term to suit their needs, but they are bound to fail in this endeavor. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not committed to multi-party rule.