Morsi, the former President of Egypt, may be under house arrest at this time yet he said early Wednesday morning:
“I am the president of Egypt,” he shouted. “There is no substitute for legitimacy, no alternative.”
Thomas Jefferson had this take on legitimacy, “Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.” Another patriot commented, your laws stop at my nose and pocket. One beauty of the United States is the fact the Founders designed the country as a republic with a rule of law, not the rule of man. Or as Morsi would counter, his legitimacy.
“Legitimacy.” Let’s not be fooled by that generality. We as People have inalienable rights. Not rights granted by kings, czars, or presidents. Nor are our rights granted by democratic vote. Rather these are rights we are born with. Rights we die with, God bless.
Ayn Rand, “I object to the idea that the people have the right to vote on everything. The traditional American system was a system based on the idea that majority will prevail only in public or political affairs. And that it was limited by inalienable individual rights, therefore I do not believe that a majority can vote a man’s life, or property, or freedom away from him.”
The Fraternal Brotherhood and Legitimacy? Let us explore that word some more.
Venezuela – 09/10/2012 – “No one can doubt any longer the legitimacy of origin of President Chavez in Venezuela,” Alvarez stressed in a interview published Tuesday in the Argentinian daily Pagina 12. “I told to opponents we are their best allies regarding transparency of process, because South America is not going to live with any kind of pro-coup tendency [anti-rule of man] neither old or new, nor a fraud-born government.”
Brazil – 06/25/2013 – YahooNews: Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Joaquim Barbosa, re: recent riots, “And that lack of interest, in part, has led to the crisis of legitimacy we have now.”
Turkey – 06/16/2013 – No one can doubt the democratic legitimacy of Mr Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister. He has won three genuine elections with many more votes than any other candidate.
Iraq:
– ABC, CNN, and NBC Touted Saddam 100-Percent “Vote” in 2002
– Wiki: Saddam took steps to control the damage; the referendum was an attempt to shore up his claim to legitimacy
Zimbabwe:
– Mugabe’s crisis of legitimacy: For a man who holds two law degrees and is surrounded by lawyers, Mugabe finds it hard to ignore the power of the law. He knows it provides the basis for challenge against his authority and has tended to overlook or stretch it when it matters. The Mugabe regime has an ambivalent approach toward the law.
Cuba:
– Cuba’s military brass, the Communist Party, the Interior Ministry and government agencies are convinced that after the comandante’s death they will desperately need a figure that will give international legitimacy to an unpopular, tottering and totally anachronistic regime
Tangent: Research was also done on regimes, oftentimes called hegemonic authoritarian regimes, where non-competitive elections were held so that the regime could claim the mantle of electoral legitimacy but where the outcome was never in any way in doubt. Because elections themselves are a powerful tool, we now live in a world where there are elections all over the globe, but in many instances they mean next to nothing.
Ayn Rand,
America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to “the common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservative” was only to retard that process.)
Someone told me: The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another. Man’s character is the product of his premises. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
Freedom is the first requirement of “the public interest”…achievements rest on that foundation—and cannot exist without it.