Drjones
Weeeeellll, not quite.
Republic: "a form of government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law."
-- Websters Unabridged Dictionary
Democracy: "a government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meetings or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude towards property is communistic-negative property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. It results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy."
-- U.S. Army Training Manual
We live in a Representative Republic -- not a Democracy. What you describe would be a pure democracy on its face and, for three people to overrule the fifty-percent-plus-one that denotes a democracy, would, indeed, be wrong.
The problem is that this is not our form of government; and thank your lucky stars it isn't.
We elect singular persons to represent the many and, when we do, we are saying, with a single mark upon a ballot, that we trust that person's ability to make decisions for those s/he represents. We also are saying that we trust them to make the correct decision when it comes to the people s/he appoints to various offices. Some of those appointees are placed in their positions for as long as they exhibit "good behavior". The problem is that noone has ever taken the time to define what "good behavior" is. Certainly, the behahior exhibited by the three judge panel recently is far from "good behavior"; but that is just
our opinion since no standard has been set.
The failing of the system is that we have slowly motivated toward becoming a democracy. This has occurred through many outlets, the greatest being our elected leaders constantly reminding us that "We live in a Democracy". The ratification of the fifteenth amendment was another.
The fifteenth amendment gave everyone the vote for the same reason that the decision was made the other day -- the "disenfranchisement" of some people. The problem with that was, under our form of government, some people were
supposed to be disenfranchised.
The people who were to vote were the people who were landowners. The way to get to vote was to earn yourself a little piece of America you could call your own. Now, you would have a vested interest in the furtherance and preservation of the republic.
Then the bleeding hearts came along and, realizing they had a great untapped resource for gaining unbridled power, decided they would lobby for everyone to vote. Mistake. Bad, bad mistake.
The result was that those who were now allowed to vote -- yes, I said "allowed" because, due to the wording of the fifteenth amendment, specifically Section 2, voting is not a right -- had no vested interest in anything but themselves.
The best way of illustrating why I say that would be to peruse the following quote by 18th century historian/economist Alexander Tyler
written in 1778:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years.
These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.
I personally believe that we, as a nation, are now somewhere between complacency and apathy.
So, no, you didn't get it right; but, if things continue to progress in the direction they have been for the past several decades, someday you will. By then, it will be too late and the mobs will rule the day.
