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From: shad@teldata.UUCP (Warren N. Shadwick)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Participative Democracy
Message-ID: <327@teldata.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-May-84 13:23:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: teldata.327
Posted: Tue May  1 13:23:55 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 4-May-84 03:14:32 EDT
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*

There has been a discussion started about democracies and their
comparative value.

Such concepts were well known by the men who wrote our present
Constitution.  In fact there are records of Thomas Jefferson,
who was in Europe at the time and therefore could not participate,
sending volumes of material on comparative forms of government
to the men who were to sit through the long hot summer of 1787
drafting the Constitution.  Don't think for one minute that the
form of government that was chosen was done for light and 
transient reasons.

I have a friend whose opinion I somewhat endorse that the form
of government that was finally selected (limited, representative
republic) was the confirmation of the principle that no one
really trusts anyone else and the best way to preserve the freedoms
and rights given to us by "Nature and Nature's God  (see Declaration
of Independence) was to severely limit the government.  As Thomas
Jefferson aptly remarked, "Tie them down with the chains of the
Constitution so they can do no mischief."

Somehow are government has loosed these bonds (I think it is truly
because the rightful soveriegns, the People, have been negligent
in holding the government to the contract).

Participative democracies are only a way to force the will of a
few people (or even a majority) on the rest of the people.  Another
term for democracy is 'mobocracy': the rule of the mob.  James
Madison noted quite acurately in the "Federalist Papers" that
democracies have been as short in their lives as they are violent
in their deaths.  If anyone should doubt this, there is plenty of
evidence in history.  The best most recent examples of this are
the several French revolutions.  A most lucid argument against
democracies is presented in the book "The Law" by Fredrick Bastiat.


				Yours always in freedom,

				   Warren N. Shadwick