Quote:
Originally Posted by superbug
So you would have no problem with mob rule?  |
I don't know were you guys get this idea that democracy is some kind of mob rule institution, as if no one in world has the right to vote for the issues that will ultimately rule their lives.
In a free society the people rule themselves. In a constitutional democracy specifically, people rule themselves by means of voting, that voting process being governed by constitutional princlpes. No mob rule involved, and tyranny avoided by a simple 51% majority opinion.
Here's an interesting quote from the Declaration of Independence:
...Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the governed...
Deriving just powers from the governed doesn't sound like mob rule to me.
Now at this point I've quoted the declaration of Independence, and someone is going to come onto this thread and assume that by doing that, I've labeled the U.S. a democracy, and then recite those legendary words: "The United States is not a democracy, it's a republic." So I'm just going to head off this inevitable argument by addressing it now.
To be specific, our nation is actually a Democratic Republic, but adherents to this line of thought always seem to conveniently forget the first part of that title - the democratic part indicating that the people are to have some role in determining the destiny of the government which is to rule their lives on a daily basis. This concept of self-rule being one of the basic principles of liberty on which the nation was founded.
Article 1, section 2 of the Constitution describes the House of representatives as:
"composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states"
The Founding Fathers placing enough importance on the democratic rights of the people to position that statement in the second paragraph of the nation's founding document, (the first paragraph having been allotted to defining what the Congress is and what it does).
So it while it may be true that we are not technically a democracy, anyone who tries to tell you that the United States was not founded on democratic prinicples is simply not familiar with American history.