Disadvantages Of Democracy Quotes

I always contended that we as a race must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, but to create a moral balance in society where democracy and brotherhood would be reality for all men.

Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at lenght, and with deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can be hardly expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized.But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralisation of power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive - and so less available to the eterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has grobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State - that is to say, by small group of party leaders and soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders.

A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us, as now... ...that the names of all the men eligible in each assembly district be put into a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough, into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of tender years, be delegated to draw out one... The advantages that this system would offer are so vast and obvious that I hesitate to venture into the banality of rehearsing them. It would in the first place, save the commonwealth the present excessive cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would in the second place, get rid of all the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of mind – men actually convinced that public service is a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators, having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only to finish their duties and go home, and even those who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to increase the probability, even by one chance in a million, of their reelection. The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it... Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it today, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men. They have to abase themselves to get it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in order to hold it. The fact reflects in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men congenitally capable of cringing and dishonorable acts, else they would not have got into public life at all. There are, of course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how many? What I contend is simply that the number of such exceptions is bound to be smaller in the class of professional job-seekers than it is in any other class, or in the population in general. What I contend, second, is that choosing legislators from that populations, by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion of such slimy men in the halls of legislation, and that the effects would be instantly visible in a great improvement in the justice and reasonableness of the laws.

True market fundamentalists in the economics profession are few and far between. Not only are they absent from the center of the profession; they are rare at the “right-wing” extreme. Milton Friedman, a legendary libertarian, makes numerous exceptions, on everything from money to welfare to antitrust: Our principles offer no hard and fast line how far it is appropriate to use government to accomplish jointly what is difficult or impossible for us to accomplish separately through strictly voluntary exchange. In any particular case of proposed intervention, we must make up a balance sheet, listing separately the advantages and disadvantages.

Given the degree of feedback available to the average citizen of a democracy, it makes little sense to agitate for changing the system as a whole. Since the system is so flexible and responsive, it is impossible to imagine that it can be replaced with any system that is more flexible – thus the practical ideal for anyone interested in social change is to bring his ideas to the “marketplace” of democracy, see who he can get on board, and implement his vision within the system – peacefully, politically, democratically. This is a truly wonderful fairy tale, which has only the slight disadvantage of having nothing to do with democracy whatsoever.

It is the autobiography of a slave who became and advisor to President Lincoln and the diplomatic representative of the United States to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Hence, this narrative of his life has inspired Negroes and other disadvantaged Americans to believe that, despite the imperfections of American democracy, a self-made man many aspire to greatness.

Two centuries ago, the United States settled into a permanent political order, after fourteen years of violence and heated debate. Two centuries ago, France fell into ruinous disorder that ran its course for twenty-four years. In both countries there resounded much ardent talk of rights--rights natural, rights prescriptive. . . . [F]anatic ideology had begun to rage within France, so that not one of the liberties guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man could be enjoyed by France's citizens. One thinks of the words of Dostoievski: "To begin with unlimited liberty is to end with unlimited despotism." . . . In striking contrast, the twenty-two senators and fifty-nine representatives who during the summer of 1789 debated the proposed seventeen amendments to the Constitution were men of much experience in representative government, experience acquired within the governments of their several states or, before 1776, in colonial assembles and in the practice of the law. Many had served in the army during the Revolution. They decidedly were political realists, aware of how difficult it is to govern men's passions and self-interest. . . . Among most of them, the term democracy was suspect. The War of Independence had sufficed them by way of revolution. . . . The purpose of law, they knew, is to keep the peace. To that end, compromises must be made among interests and among states. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists ranked historical experience higher than novel theory. They suffered from no itch to alter American society radically; they went for sound security. The amendments constituting what is called the Bill of Rights were not innovations, but rather restatements of principles at law long observed in Britain and in the thirteen colonies. . . . The Americans who approved the first ten amendments to their Constitution were no ideologues. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau had any substantial following among them. Their political ideas, with few exceptions, were those of English Whigs. The typical textbook in American history used to inform us that Americans of the colonial years and the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras were ardent disciples of John Locke. This notion was the work of Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington, chiefly. It fitted well enough their liberal convictions, but . . . it has the disadvantage of being erroneous. . . . They had no set of philosophes inflicted upon them. Their morals they took, most of them, from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Their Bill of Rights made no reference whatever to political abstractions; the Constitution itself is perfectly innocent of speculative or theoretical political arguments, so far as its text is concerned. John Dickinson, James Madison, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, and other thoughtful delegates to the Convention in 1787 knew something of political theory, but they did not put political abstractions into the text of the Constitution. . . . Probably most members of the First Congress, being Christian communicants of one persuasion or another, would have been dubious about the doctrine that every man should freely indulge himself in whatever is not specifically prohibited by positive law and that the state should restrain only those actions patently "hurtful to society." Nor did Congress then find it necessary or desirable to justify civil liberties by an appeal to a rather vague concept of natural law . . . . Two centuries later, the provisions of the Bill of Rights endure--if sometimes strangely interpreted. Americans have known liberty under law, ordered liberty, for more than two centuries, while states that have embraced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with its pompous abstractions, have paid the penalty in blood.

To entrench themselves in power, however, governments must do more—they must also change the rules of the game. Authoritarians seeking to consolidate their power often reform the constitution, the electoral system, and other institutions in ways that disadvantage or weaken the opposition, in effect tilting the playing field against their rivals. These reforms are often carried out under the guise of some public good, while in reality they are stacking the deck in favor of incumbents. And because they involve legal and even constitutional changes, they may allow autocrats to lock in these advantages for years and even decades.

The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.

Currently the best educated and the brightest minds of any nation are not among its elected, but among its public, and in much greater numbers. But even having a great number of the best and the brightest amongst us does not make us capable of installing a working version of direct democracy right away. People who claim that it does, may be there to voluntarily or involuntarily damage the credibility of direct democracy. Direct democracy needs a yet inexistent infrastructure to support the new mechanism that will render the public capable of constituting the experience necessary to domesticate direct democracy, without destabilizing our societies with needless haste, emotions and fractures. One way of doing it may be the constitution of a nation-wide, internet reliant hence fluid, non-political organism parallel but totally hermetic to our representative democracies, with a unique objective: creating the means, platforms and protocols necessary for the public and all the specialists it contains, to communicate horizontally. The public may decide to keep for the moment our representative democracies, but in parallel create an experimental version of direct democracy until we all acquire the necessary perspective and invent new working mechanisms of self-governance. Later the public may decide to have both representative and direct democracies sharing governance for a time, and experience first-hand the advantages and disadvantages of both systems before deciding where to go from there.

The character of the Republican Party reflects a profound change: radicalism has shifted its location and meaning. Formerly it was associated with the Left and with the use of political power to lift the standard of living and life prospects of the lower classes, of those who were disadvantaged under current distributive principles. Radicalism is now the property of those who, quaintly, call themselves “conservatives” and are called such by media commentators. In fact, pseudoconservatism is in charge of and owns the radicalizing powers that are dramatically changing, in some cases revolutionizing, the conditions of human life, of economy, politics, foreign policy, education, and the prospects of the planet. It is hard to imagine any power more radical in its determination to undo the social gains of the past century.

More specifically, this book will try to establish the following points. First, there are not two great liberal social and political systems but three. One is democracy—political liberalism—by which we decide who is entitled to use force; another is capitalism—economic liberalism—by which we decide how to allocate resources. The third is liberal science, by which we decide who is right. Second, the third system has been astoundingly successful, not merely as a producer of technology but also, far more important, as a peacemaker and builder of social bridges. Its great advantages as a social system for raising and settling differences of opinion are inherent, not incidental. However, its disadvantages—it causes pain and suffering, it creates legions of losers and outsiders, it is disorienting and unsettling, it allows and even thrives on prejudice and bias—are also inherent. And today it is once again under attack. Third, the attackers seek to undermine the two social rules which make liberal science possible. (I’ll outline them in the next chapter and elaborate them in the rest of the book.) For the system to function, people must try to follow those rules even if they would prefer not to. Unfortunately, many people are forgetting them, ignoring them, or carving out exemptions. That trend must be fought, because, fourth, the alternatives to liberal science lead straight to authoritarianism. And intellectual authoritarianism, although once the province of the religious and the political right in America, is now flourishing among the secular and the political left. Fifth, behind the new authoritarian push are three idealistic impulses: Fundamentalists want to protect the truth. Egalitarians want to help the oppressed and let in the excluded. Humanitarians want to stop verbal violence and the pain it causes. The three impulses are now working in concert. Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought. Seventh, there is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to the principles advocated by egalitarians and humanitarians. Their principles are poisonous to liberal science and ultimately to peace and freedom. Eighth, no social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., “harassment”) and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.

The German people is gradually being threatened with the loss of its genetic quality, assertion of identity, and self-preservation drive. Instead, internationalism is triumphing and destroying the value of our people, democracy is spreading by smothering the individual identity, and a nasty pacifist sewage is ultimately poisoning the mindset of bold self-preservation. We see the effects of these human vices appearing everywhere in the life of our people. Not only in the area of political concerns—no, also in the economic area, and last but not least a downward sliding [sic] is noticeable in our cultural life. If this descent is not halted, our people will no longer be able to be counted among those nations with a promising future. Eliminating these general aspects of decay is the great domestic policy task of the future. This is the mission of the National Socialist movement. From this work, a new body politic must come into being, which must also overcome the most serious disadvantage of the present, the division between the classes, for which the bourgeoisie and the Marxists are equally culpable.

The German people is gradually being threatened with the loss of its genetic quality, assertion of identity, and self-preservation drive. Instead, internationalism is triumphing and destroying the value of our people, democracy is spreading by smothering the individual identity, and a nasty pacifist sewage is ultimately poisoning the mindset of bold self-preservation. We see the effects of these human vices appearing everywhere in the life of our people. Not only in the area of political concerns—no, also in the economic area, and last but not least a downward sliding [sic] is noticeable in our cultural life. If this descent is not halted, our people will no longer be able to be counted among those nations with a promising future. Eliminating these general aspects of decay is the great domestic policy task of the future. This is the mission of the National Socialist movement. From this work, a new body politic must come into being, which must also o vercome the most serious disadvantage of the present, the division between the classes, for which the bourgeoisie and the Marxists are equally culpable.

Many historians, many sociologists and psychologists have written at length, and with deep concern, about the price that Western man has had to pay and will go on paying for technological progress. They point out, for example, that democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such concentration and centralization of power. As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive – and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State – that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders.

The first such avenue was education. After Independence there was a great expansion in school and college education. By law, a certain portion of seats were reserved for the Scheduled Castes. By policy, different state governments endowed scholarships for children from disadvantaged homes.

Democracy is a system in which those who are disadvantaged by present arrangements have both the incentive and the resources to point to the defects of those ar- rangements, show how the truth about them is being obscured, and try to get those arrangements changed.

It becomes me not to say what particular form of government is best for a community, whether a pure democracy. aristocracy, monarchy, or a mixture of all the three simple forms. They have all their advantages and disadvantages, and when they are properly administered may, any of them, answer the design of civil government tolerably. Permit me, however, to say, that an unlimited, absolute monarchy, and an aristocracy not subject to the control of the people, are two of the most exceptionable forms of government: firstly, because in neither of them is there a proper representation of the people: and, secondly, because each of them being entirely independent of the people. they are very apt to degenerate into tyranny. However, in this imperfect state, we cannot expect to have government formed upon such a basis but that it may he perverted by had men to evil purposes. A wise and good man would he very loth to undermine a constitution that was once fixed and established, although he might discover many imperfections in it; and nothing short of the most urgent necessity would ever induce him to consent to it: because the unhinging a people from a form of government to which they had been long accustomed might throw them into such a state of anarchy and confusion as might terminate in their destruction, or perhaps, in the end, subject them to the worst kind of tyranny.

The substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes, should be provided with a ratable share of the sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the result of this will be the direction of power by wisdom, seems to me the wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number of minds.

Ideologies are the frameworks through which we are taught to represent, interpret, understand, and make sense of social existence.14 Because these ideas are constantly reinforced, they are very hard to avoid believing and internalizing. Examples of ideology in the United States include individualism, the superiority of capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system, consumerism as a desirable lifestyle, and meritocracy (anyone can succeed if he or she works hard). The racial ideology that circulates in the United States rationalizes racial hierarchies as the outcome of a natural order resulting from either genetics or individual effort or talent. Those who don’t succeed are just not as naturally capable, deserving, or hardworking. Ideologies that obscure racism as a system of inequality are perhaps the most powerful racial forces because once we accept our positions within racial hierarchies, these positions seem natural and difficult to question, even when we are disadvantaged by them. In this way, very little external pressure needs to be applied to keep people in their places; once the rationalizations for inequality are internalized, both sides will uphold the relationship.

The greatest lesson was this: “What they do to us we cannot do to them,” said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia from 2006 to 2016. “Liberal democracies with a free press and free and fair elections are at an asymmetric disadvantage.… The tools of their democratic and free speech can be used against them.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as well as the theoreticians of SIW and fourth generation warfare, lack the political dimension with respect to the situation after the war. They concentrate too much on purely military success, and undervalue the process of transforming military success into true victory. The three core elements of Sun Tzu’s strategy could not easily be applied in our times: a general attitude to deception of the enemy runs the risk of deceiving one’s own population, which would be problematic for any democracy. An indirect strategy in general would weaken deterrence against an adversary who could act quickly and with determination. Concentration on influencing the will and mind of the enemy may merely enable him to avoid fighting at a disadvantageous time and place and make it possible for him to choose a better opportunity as long as he is in possession of the necessary means—weapons and armed forces.

I revisited Raigarh exactly twenty years later,’ he said. ‘I was amazed at the devastation I saw, the extent to which it has been exploited. It symbolizes the whole question of what constitutes development and who benefits. There was one imagination of government when I joined the civil services in 1980; there was no doubt that the theory of government was that its primary duty was towards the poor and the disadvantaged. There were lots of deviations from that ideal, but then they were perceived and recognized as deviations from that ideal.

research university that primarily awards master’s degrees and PhDs, JNU saw the number of seats offered to students wishing to enroll in a master’s or a doctoral program plummet by 84 percent, from 1,234 to 194 in one year.101 Furthermore, admissions committees were made up solely of experts appointed by the JNU vice-chancellor, flouting university statutes and guidelines followed by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which stipulate that academics should be involved.102 This made it possible to hire teachers from Hindu nationalist circles,103 with few qualifications,104 and some facing charges of plagiarism.105 In particular, several former ABVP student activists from JNU have been appointed as assistant professors even after being disqualified by the committee in charge of short-listing applicants.106 The vice-chancellor replaced deans in the School of Social Sciences without following appointment procedures, cutting the number of researchers by 80 percent and ceasing to apply rules JNU had set to ensure diversity through a mechanism taking into account the social background and geographic origin of its applicants.107 The new recruitment procedure strongly disadvantaged Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs, who used to make up nearly 50 percent of the student intake and who now accounted for a mere 7 percent. The vice-chancellor also issued ad hoc promotions, nominating recently appointed faculty members to the post of full professor. Conversely, the freeze on promotions for “antigovernment” teachers who should have been promoted on the basis of seniority prompted some of the diktat’s victims to take the matter to court.108 However, even after the court—taking note of the illegality of the rejection procedure—ordered a reexamination of the claimants’ promotions, the latter were once again denied.109

democracy is at a great disadvantage against a dictatorship when it comes to war. Secondly a government with only one big man in it, and that one man a grave danger in many respects, is in a powerless way.

Page and Brin set out to deliberately “disrupt” the classic idea of a public corporation. The very idea of shareholder democracy was anathema to them. They wanted all the advantages of the public’s investment capital but none of the disadvantages of having to answer to shareholders.

Early members of the society desired to establish philosophical foundations for marketplace freedoms but expressed deep skepticism toward the intolerance and irrationality of unsubstantiated political absolutes. They sought to reach out to the religious believers and the economically disadvantaged individuals whom they believed nineteenth-century market advocates had mistakenly eschewed but demonstrated hostility toward theological dogmatism and the redistributive state. They glorified the achievements of capitalism but at times expressed dismay at its cultural and moral effects. They valorized liberty but maintained the vital need for collective moral traditions. They defended capitalism as a theory of individual choice but expressed deep suspicion of the implications of political democracy.

Our parties are two different cultures, each with its own version of reality and each with its own look. On the right—the Republican side—is two-thirds of white America, aging and longing for a time when economic security was nearly taken for granted and when moral codes were more sharply defined. It was a time of white privilege, one that was, and remains, so deeply embedded in society that most of its beneficiaries fail to see it and thus fail to acknowledge the legitimate grievances of the disadvantaged. That version of America is not coming back. Never in history has time reversed itself in a way that many on the populist right are hoping it will. Trump might not be their last gasp, but there will be a last gasp.

Elections were an essential and inseparable part of the democratic process and there was no way of doing away with them. Yet, often enough, elections brought out the evil side of man, and it was obvious that they did not always lead to the success of the better man. Sensitive persons, and those who were not prepared to adopt rough-and-ready methods to push themselves forward, were at a disadvantage and preferred to avoid these contests. Was democracy then to be a close

All the electrical components on a computer chip are clocked to operate in sync. A microelectronic crystal beats billions of times each second, switching the digital circuitry on and off in concert, which helps the millions of circuits on the chip communicate with one another efficiently. This centralized design, with all components slaved to a tyrannical master clock, has some notable disadvantages: 15 percent of the circuitry is wasted on distributing the clock signal, and the clock itself consumes 20 percent of the power. But engineers still favor this design because of its conceptual simplicity, and because the alternative—a democracy of many local clocks, as in firefly swarms and circadian pacemaker cells—is still not well enough understood to be easily imitated in practice.

There are times when democracy can be a disadvantage. There is an often-recounted and many-versioned story of the mercurial Doug Scott on K2. All versions end with Doug disagreeing with the others, who suggest that the matter be put to the vote. ‘You know, youth,’ replied Doug, ‘democracy is a bit of a failure if you end up having to vote on it.

Sir Alan Redmayne believed in the rule of law. It was, after all, the basis of any democracy. Whenever asked, Sir Alan agreed with Churchill that, as a form of government, democracy had its disadvantages, but, on balance, it remained the best on offer. But given a free hand, he would have opted for a benevolent dictatorship. The problem was that dictators, by their very nature, were not benevolent. It simply didn’t fit their job description.

if you were on the way home late at night and you heard footsteps behind you, would you be more or less concerned if you knew they belonged to someone coming from Bible Study? You don’t have to be a Catholic, or even a Christian, to see that Judeo-Christian societies are fairer, happier, healthier, and more tolerant than others. If you’re disabled, female, black, gay, or any other disadvantaged group you care to mention, there’s nowhere better to be than in a rich Western liberal democracy whose society is underpinned by Judeo-Christian principles. Yet the progressive Left in America seems determined to tear down everything that has made the West a nice place to live for people who aren’t rich straight white males.

Although South Africa has been a democracy under a single government since 1994, tax payers’ money is still used to pay ten African kings, a ‘Rain Queen’,13 hundreds of chiefs and thousands of headmen who enact laws that run parallel to the official laws of the land.14 South Africa is also one of the most unequal societies in the world. There is an enormous gap between the haves and the have-nots, the legacy of a succession of white-minority governments whose policies of segregation and apartheid15 left the majority of people disadvantaged. Regrettably, even since the fall of the old systems, there has not been much narrowing of the gap between the rich and the poor, and corruption abounds.

If Winston Churchill was right that democracy is nothing more than “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms,” it is worth focusing on the minimal yet fundamental task at which democracies seem to excel: avoiding catastrophic outcomes and striving for stability and resilience to unpredictable shocks. Because even if we can’t agree on exactly the kind of society we want to live in, we can typically come to a consensus on the worst outcomes we want to avoid, such as imposing harm on individuals, being cruel to disadvantaged populations, and creating second-class citizens.