paul andrew bourne wrote:Is democracy better than other social arrangements of governance? I am forwarding the position, that democracy by any social definition is oppressive . .
Democracy is no better than two wolves and a sheep voting for what shall be for dinner. Our Founding Fathers knew this and is why they gave us a constitutionally limited Republican Form of Government in which the inalienable rights of the individual were intended to be protected by government, not trampled upon as they now are.
Those who confuse our system of government [a constitutionally limited Republican form of government, protected by Art. IV , Sec. 4, u.s.const.] with DEMOCRACY should find the following quite interesting.
Madison, who, in talking about "democracies", points out in Federalist Paper No. 10. "...have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths..."; and during the Convention which framed our Constitution, Elbridge Gerry and Roger Sherman, delegates from Massachusetts and Connecticut, urged the Convention to create a system which would eliminate "the evils we experience," saying that those "evils . . .flow from the excess of democracy..."; and then there was John Adams, a principle force in the American Revolutionary period who pointed out "democracy will envy all, contend with all, endeavor to pull down all; and when by chance it happens to get the upper hand for a short time, it will be revengeful, bloody, and cruel...".
Democracy can best be described as mob-rule government…very different from our constitutionally limited Republican form of government...our constitution being designed to protect life, liberty and rights associated with property ownership, democracy yielding to mob-rule feeling and group theft!
There may be many definitions of what one calls "democracy", but the irrefutable fact is, our system was created with a specific intent to restrain the excesses of "democracy" .
JWK