Townhall...
Is
Democracy Viable?
By Thomas Sowell
6/29/2011
The
media have recently been so
preoccupied with a Congressman’s photograph of himself in his underwear
that
there has been scant attention paid to the fact that Iran continues
advancing
toward creating a nuclear bomb, and nobody is doing anything that is
likely to
stop them.
Nuclear
weapons in the hands of the
world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism might seem to be
something
that would sober up even the most giddy members of the chattering
class. But
that chilling prospect cannot seem to compete for attention with cheap
behavior
by an immature Congressman, infatuated with himself.
A
society that cannot or will not
focus on matters of life and death is a society whose survival as a
free nation
is at least questionable. Hard as it may be to conceive how the kind of
world
that one has been used to, and taken for granted, can come to an end,
it can
happen in the lifetime of today’s generation.
Those
who founded the United States of
America were keenly aware that they were making a radical departure in
the
kinds of governments under which human beings had lived over the
centuries --
and that its success was by no means guaranteed. Monarchies in Europe
had
lasted for centuries and the Chinese dynasties for thousands of years.
But a
democratic republic was something else.
While
the convention that was writing
the Constitution of the United States was still in session, a lady
asked
Benjamin Franklin what the delegation was creating. “A republic,
madam,” he
said, “if you can keep it.”
In
the middle of the next century,
Abraham Lincoln still posed it as a question whether “government of the
people,
by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Years
earlier, Lincoln had warned of the dangers to a free society from its
own
designing power-seekers -- and how only the vigilance, wisdom and
dedication of
the public could preserve their freedom.
But,
today, few people seem to see
such dangers, either internally or internationally.
A
recent poll showed that nearly half
the American public believes that the government should redistribute
wealth.
That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and
dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians -- risking their
own
freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has -- is a painful sign
of how
far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a
democratic republic.
The
ease with which people with wealth
can ship it overseas electronically, or put it in tax shelters at home,
means
that raising the tax rate on wealthy people is not going to bring in
the kind
of tax revenue that would enable wealth redistribution to provide the
bonanza
that some people are expecting.
In
other words, people who are willing
to give government more arbitrary power can give up their birthright of
freedom
without even getting the mess of pottage. Worse yet, they can give up
their
children’s and their grandchildren’s birthright of freedom…
Read
the rest of the story at Townhall
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