I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be.
Category: democracy
Democracy is a threat to the American republic
The media’s daily outbursts about the danger to democracy posed by the current administration, while highly amusing, omit a key piece of information. The United States is not a democracy; the United States is a republic.
Continue reading “Democracy is a threat to the American republic”
Democracy equals mob rule
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Liberty under democracies
Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.
From democracy to anarchy
In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature.
Democracy enslaves
Democracy, which began by liberating man politically, has developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of majorities and the deadly power of their opinion.
‘Freedom’ does not define democracy
To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process.
Forms of tyranny
Tyranny seldom announces itself … In fact, a tyranny may exist without an individual tyrant. A whole government, even a democratically elected one, may be tyrannical.
The false premise of democracy
Democracy arose from men thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal in all respects.
Tyranny of the majority
And what sort of philosophical doctrine is this — that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others … How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed … It is not possible to suppose, without absurdity, that a man should have no rights over his own body and mind, and yet have a 1/10,000,000th share in unlimited rights over all other bodies and minds?