Tag: Spain

Categories
general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall political challengers Regulating Protest

Self-​Determination, Anyone?

An election can be a clarifying event. 

So can the suppression of an election.

Over the weekend, more than two million Catalans, greater than 40 percent of those eligible, voted in a referendum on independence from Spain. To which Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy declared, “There was no independence referendum in Catalonia today.”

Rajoy certainly tried to stop it. 

Spanish authorities shut down referendum websites and sent hordes of national police into the region to seize ballots and forcibly prevent people from voting. News reports are full of those police using rubber bullets on crowds, smashing their way into polling places and roughing up people. 

Nearly a thousand citizens of Catalonia were injured in various clashes.

While the referendum result was a lopsided 90 percent opting for independence, previous polling shows Catalans split on the question. Perhaps the suppression worked best with those opposed to separation from Spain, who seem to have stayed home.

Let the people have a fair vote and follow the result. Anything less suggests support for the unthinkable: holding the Catalans in Spain against their will.  

Last week, Iraqi Kurds also held a referendum in which voters overwhelmingly favored separation — in this case from Iraq and for the formation of their own wholly independent nation. And, likewise, others, including the United States, tried to block the vote. Thankfully, not by force. 

Yet. Turkey and Iran oppose an independent Kurdistan because they fear it will embolden demands by their own Kurdish populations for greater autonomy. Or independence.

In a world with respect for freedom, the principle is obvious: self-​determination. Take it as far as you like. 

Or even as far as Ludwig von Mises took it.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

 

* “The right of self-​determination,” Mises wrote in Liberalism (1927), “in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.”

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Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall nannyism political challengers Regulating Protest

Irony in Spain

Spain, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, initiative, democracy

When I arrived at the Donostia-​San Sebastián City Hall, in the beautiful Basque Country of Spain, I wondered what all the ruckus was about. There were hundreds of noisy protesters waving long, colorful banners.

My goodness, how interesting to witness acts of political agitation on the public square in another country, I thought. Then, atop the crowd some 20 feet opposite the protest, I spied Daniel Schily, a key activist, funder and cheerleading motivator of the direct democracy movement in Germany.

After greeting, he drily brought me up to date: “They’re protesting us.”

“No, really,” I asked, “what are they protesting?”

“Really,” he said, seemingly sincere. “They’re protesting the Global Forum.”

I stood there dumbstruck, for a moment, before I noticed one sign written in English: “Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy,” with a very large, black, bold question mark beside it.

Schily wasn’t kidding.

In almost no time, I met up with friends from Bulgaria, South Korea, Uruguay, Chile — fellow activists, all. We had gathered in this “cultural capital of Europe” precisely because of our belief that all people have a right to not only speak out, but effect change, through ballot initiatives and referendums.

It turned out that the protestors hailed from the Satorralaia neighborhood movement. Their beef? Even after gathering nearly 9,000 signatures on petitions requesting a public referendum on a proposed through-​station for the mass-​transit metro system project, the city government shrugs.

The same city council that helped organize our forum, ignoring citizens while claiming the city is “The World Capital of Democracy.”

Government. What more proof do we need that it could use more checks and balances from the people themselves?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

N.B. This is a Common Sense digest version of Paul’s weekend column. For more information, see Saturday’s and Sunday’s posts. Paul was in transit home when this entry was being prepared for the Web; he may offer further reports from his trip in the near future.

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Spain, Paul Jacob, Common Sense, initiative, democracy

 

Categories
national politics & policies

Spain Slows Down

Spain has reduced its speed limit, from 120 kmh to 110 (about 68 mph). So of course some are asking whether the U.S. should similarly put on the brakes.

It’s ’70s déjà vu: OPEC was throwing its cartel weight around, Nixon responded with wage and price controls, which led to long lines at gas stations. And, for the first time, the federal government cajoled states to reduce highway speed limits to 55 mph.

We still argue about the results. Freeway deaths went down, to hurrahs. 

But, forced to travel 55 or thereabouts, more and more drivers opted to drive the secondary roads, roads less capable of handling increases in speed and congestion. Traffic fatalities there went up.

Most obviously, we saved gas but wasted time. 

If you are narrowly focused on one thing — gasoline used, in toto — you are unlikely to care. But wasting people’s time comes with many social costs, from fewer hours spent with kids to more hours driven drowsily. So a number of deaths by speed were swapped for a number of deaths by fatigue. 

Right now each of us can save gas — by driving less, or slower, or trading in the commuter car for a motorcycle. But each of these comes at a cost, with trade-​offs ranging from lost productivity to what for some would be a net loss in safety.

Any attempt to force such trade-​offs as policy warrants careful thought, a reasonable understanding of all the costs.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.