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By Root 767 0

People tend to forget that Adolph Hitler was democratically elected, but people will never forget what resulted from his reign over Germany. In the antebellum American South, slavery was also present in a democratic society. The majority of voters in the South were white people who were property owners. These people authorized themselves by law to own black people as slaves. The Los Angeles Times, in a 1992 editorial about California politics at the time, stated,

Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote. Those rights are spelled out in the Bill of Rights and in our California Constitution. Voters and politicians alike would do well to take a look at the rights we each hold, which must never be chipped away by the whim of the majority.3

Amen.

Liberty never lasts in a system where all laws are created by a majority vote; as Benjamin Franklin said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” It was for this reason the United States was not founded as a democracy. James Madison expressed this view in Federalist No. 10 of The Federalist Papers:

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Hence it is that such democracies 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. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.4

Our Duty to Protect Our Rights with a Locke

After John Locke created the seeds of Revolution, it fell to someone in America to plant these seeds in the minds of his brethren in order to form a better society. Thomas Paine, a student of the Enlightenment, assumed this responsibility when he wrote and published a pamphlet entitled Common Sense on January 10th 1776. It was an instant success. At its time it was the best-selling book in American history, selling about five hundred thousand copies in its first year. This book was so popular because it was a beautiful argument premised on Locke’s revolutionary ideas, with the aim of solving the colonists’ woes. His solution, of course, was American independence from Britain and the creation of a new and just form of limited governance.

Paine began Common Sense by restating Locke’s theory of man in the state of nature and why governments are formed. Paine understood his first goal was convincing Americans to go to war with Britain to win independence. To achieve this goal, Paine presented, and refuted, all of the arguments against maintaining the status quo and remaining loyal to Britain.

I Pledge Allegiance, to the Crown, of the United States of America

First, he tackled the theory espoused by British loyalists that since America had flourished under British rule, it should maintain its tight political bonds to Britain. Paine declared this just as absurd as concluding that because a baby had grown by drinking milk, it should never mature to eat meat. Paine even refuted the premise of this argument completely, and instead suggested that America had flourished despite British rule over the colonies and not as a result of British rule over the colonies.

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This debate is eerily similar to a debate between American conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan and Thomas DiLorenzo, an economics professor at Loyola University Maryland.5 Buchanan suggested that it was because of the institution of central banking and protective tariffs that the American economy saw the greatest progress in world history, progressing from half the size of the British economy in the mid-nineteenth century into twice the size of the British economy in the early twentieth century. DiLorenzo