Interesting charts. The shift to thinking of the United States as a single entity instead of Divided Sovereignty around 1900 created the great problems we face today. Monolithic Federal standards re-established Tyranny of the Majority. A majority of voters are drivers. To get cheaper gasoline, we elect politicians that will borrow against the future labor of our children to subsidize current consumption. Debt is the tax on future labor, Taxation without Representation. Taxing without Representation and Tyranny of the Majority (faction) are recurring themes in the path to war. Madison noted how diversity of State economies was to be the defense against faction in Federalist #10: If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful. From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. 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.
Posted on: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 15:54:01 +0000
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