Force cannot be used in the interests of freedom—except for self-defense and rebellion against slavery. This holds true whether the force is applied by a majority or a minority. It holds true whether the force is applied by a robber with a pistol or by a representative of the majority of the people who have voted to force other persons to do what the majority considers “best for them.” The theory now held in this country that the votes of the majority automatically insure freedom is incorrect. It is now leading us to our own destruction. Might has never made right. It never will.

This is not to deny that a republic or representative democracy is the most desirable form of government we have yet discovered. It is not to deny that freedom is safer in the hands of the many than in the hands of the few. But it is to deny that freedom is automatically safe just because the franchise has become widespread in America; just because we call ourselves “a democracy.” It requires more than a vote to preserve liberty; it requires understanding on the part of the voters; it requires the knowledge that all governmental decrees and actions must be grounded on moral and natural law if they are to benefit the people.

Source: Dean Russell
What Can I Do?, Essays on Liberty, volume 3

Topics: Force; Freedom; Voting

When To Vote?

If voting could really be used to determine right from wrong—and what we should all be forced or forbidden to do—we could use it to settle the religious question once and for all. We could vote democratically to decide which religion we shall all be compelled to follow. (It always amuses me to observe how some of the most rabid of the social democrats back away from that one; and on occasion, I have been known to resort to the low trick of taunting the worst of them with this question: “What’s the matter—don’t you believe in democracy and the right to vote anymore?”)

Perhaps James Madison, in the tenth Federalist Paper, best answered this general question on voting and democracy. “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

That’s why our Founding Fathers deliberately established a Republic with heavy checks and balances against popular and hasty actions, instead of a Democracy in which the people are encouraged to believe that they have the “right” to vote on anything and everything. It’s too bad that their plan is being so constantly eroded away.

Source: Dean Russell
Legal But Immoral, Essays on Liberty, Volume IX

Topics: Democracy; Republic; Voting

(These paragraphs are not sequential in the original essay. I selected specific ones to include here for brevity.)

The Founding Fathers saw no reason to assume that a majority of citizens should have the final and deciding word on what bills should be enacted into law; decisions of such depth and complexity could not be left to the ever-changing whims of a majority. “No one imagines that a majority of passengers should control a plane. No one assumes that, by majority vote, the patients, nurses, elevator boys and cooks and ambulance drivers and interns and telephone operators and students and scrubwomen in a hospital should control the hospital. Would you ever ride on a train if all the passengers stepped into booths and elected the train crews by majority vote, as intelligently as you elect the men whose names appear in lists before you in a voting booth? Then why is it taken for granted that every person is endowed on his 21st birthday with a God-given right and ability to elect the men who decide questions of political philosophy and international diplomacy?

The federal government has also assumed enormous powers through a distortion of the phrase “the general welfare.” In the first Congress, in 1789, a bill was introduced to pay a bounty to fishermen at Cape Cod, as well as a subsidy to certain farmers. James Madison said: “If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of the public treasury: they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union: they may seek the provision of the poor . . . [all of which] would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America.”

In a democracy, all such processes are easily sanctioned by popular outcries: “He’s a profiteer—take it away from him.” “He’s getting too much—give it to us.” People who haven’t succeeded, or weren’t willing to make the sacrifices he made, will do all they can to take it away from him after he has succeeded. A democracy easily becomes dominated by the morality of envy. A fickle mob, unaware of the facts of basic economics, but easily swayed by demagogues demanding as their right the fruits of the labor of others, can easily bring about the passage of laws which will inhibit production, destroy the free market, and in the end lead to such shortages and bottlenecks in production that they result, just as Plato said, in riots, calls for “law and order,” and dictatorship.

Only a republic, in which the powers of the government are constitutionally limited, can avoid this fate. That is why the Founding Fathers were careful to create this nation as a republic, so that each person could determine his own destiny and not have it determined by others, whether by the tyranny of one (dictatorship) or of a few (oligarchy), or of many (democracy). “It is the blessing of a free people, not that they live under democratic government, but that they do not.”. [Richard Taylor, “the Basis of Political Authority,” the Monist, Vol. 66 No. 4 (Oct. 1983), p. 471. See also Richard Taylor, Freedom, Anarchy, and the Law (Prentice-Hall, 1973).]

If the return to a republic is not achieved, Alexis de Tocqueville’s prediction of a century and a half ago may yet come true: that the American government will become for its citizens

“an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate . . . For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? . . . The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”. [Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pp. 579-80 of the edition edited by Henry Steele Commager, 1946.]

Source: John Hospers
Freedom and Democracy, p337-8

Topics: Democracy; Government; Republic

[O]ur Constitution provides for a republic. That is, we have a republican form of government based upon the citizenry electing representatives to carry out the functions of government. The Founding Fathers did not frame a constitution that would set up a democracy—a kind of government where political power lay directly in the hands of the people. Under a pure democracy, the citizens of the state would exercise popular vote to decide what laws should be made. The majority view would be registered and then carried out by the administrative hand of the central government. There would be no representation (legislative branch of government) between the citizenry and the administrative branch of government.

A democracy might appear to be more “democratic” than a republic, but the authors of the Constitution knew that a democracy would lead to a loss of individual freedom . . . followed by anarchy or tyranny. While the Constitution was being considered for ratification by the Massachusetts Convention, Moses Ames observed:

“It has been said that a pure democracy is the best government for a small people who assemble in person . . . . It may be of some use in this argument . . . to consider, that it would be very burdensome, subject to faction and violence; decisions would often be made by surprise, in the precipitancy of passion, by men who either understand nothing or care nothing about the subject; or by interested men, or those who vote for their own indemnity. It would be a government not by laws, but by men.”

Source: Against All Enemies
Robert Bearce
The Freeman, 1980

Topics: Democracy; Republic; US Constitution

The Foundation of Laws

Let the bar proclaim “the laws, the rights, the generous plan of power” delivered from remote antiquity, inform the world of the mighty struggles and numberless sacrifices made by our ancestors in defense of freedom. Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments but original rights, conditions of original contracts, coequal with prerogative and coeval with government; that many of our rights are inherent and essential . . . . Let them search for the foundations of . . . laws and government in the frame of human nature, in the constitution of the intellectual and moral world. There let us see that truth, liberty, justice, and benevolence are its everlasting basis; and if these could be removed, the superstructure is overthrown of course.

Source: John Adams, 1765

Topics: Law; Rights

Party Passions

Speaking of the rancor of party spirit and the results which flow from it, Washington said:

“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

Source: J. Reuben Clark
“Stand Fast by Our Constitution”

Topics: Politics

Checks and Balances

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those intrusted with its administration to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.

Source: George Washington

Topics: Power

The Test of Right or Wrong.

Are there not, in reality, underlying, universal principles with reference to which all issues must be resolved whether the society be simple or complex in its mechanical organization? It seems to me we could relieve ourselves of most of the bewilderment which so unsettles and distracts us by subjecting each situation to the simple test of right and wrong. Right and wrong as moral principles do not change. They are applicable and reliable determinants whether the situations with which we deal are simple or complicated. There is always a right and a wrong to every question which requires our solution. . . .

We cannot well lay claim to being a grown-up, mature, civilized people until we have come to the point where morality is the determinant, and we ask simply what is, in good conscience, right. The conclusion seems inescapable that the confusion and distraction and conflicts and antagonisms and uncertainties and bewilderment which plague the world today present mankind with what is at bottom a purely moral issue — the issue between right and wrong. That, then, should be the final test of the propriety of all courses of action.

Source: Jerreld L. Newquist
Prophets, Principles, and National Survival

Topics: Morality

Civil Liberty vs. Appetites

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite is placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be of it without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate habits cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Source: Edmund Burke

Topics: Self Control

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