I liked the news story last weekend that Alberta artists were buying up Conservative leadership votes, available at $5 a pop, in order to vote for Jim Dinning. Dinning, y'see, had promised increases to arts funding, while the other candidates mostly wanted longer hunting seasons on artists, pretty much.
Some of those artists are probably friends of mine, and I'm pretty confident few would ever vote Conservative in a real election, even if Jim Dinning led it. They were merely investing $5 in a chance to skew the results in a party they mostly loathe.
Okay I can understand how a free-enterprise ideologue might advocate putting political power up for auction at $5 a vote. What I can't grasp is why so many people, in all our political parties, go on calling this kind of thing "democracy."
