A republic such as the United States with its universal suffrage, which many people erroneously call a democracy, has its own ultimate destruction built into it from the beginning. Universal suffrage—allowing every citizen an equal vote—sounds like a wonderful concept. It sounds like the only fair way to run any nation, but it carries the seeds of its own destruction inherent in it.

In 1790, Andrew Fraser Tytler famously quipped that “A democracy [republic] is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy [republic] will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy [republic] will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy . . .”

As a side note, I’ve never understood why we call our government a democracy. A democracy is a system of government wherein decisions are made directly by the people. Imagine calling every adult American to a meeting every time a decision has to be made about anything. The only true democracies I’m aware of in our history would be the New England town meetings in the colonial era.

What we have in the United States is a republic, a system wherein the people elect representatives who make the decisions to run the government. Originally, the right to vote was accorded only to landowners, and we had good, responsible government as a result. Through the years that has been changed so that now the only requirement for eligibility to vote is having had a certain number of birthdays, and our nation has suffered as a result.

In order to vote, one does not have to have any education whatsoever. He does not need to be able to read or write or exhibit any understanding of the issues involved in an election—or even speak our language. Cases currently in the courts seek to prohibit election officials from even being able to determine whether or not a person seeking to vote is a citizen. This is insanity.

Voters have simply learned that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury, and politicians have learned that they can keep themselves in power by paying people with public money in exchange for their votes. Statesmen need no longer apply. We don’t want people in office who will apply wisdom and fairness in their decisions. We prefer politicians who will lie to us, telling us what we want to hear, appealing to our base natures rather than dealing in right and wrong.

Don’t be fooled into believing that social welfare programs are about helping the poor, because they aren’t. They are about keeping clever politicians in office, to the detriment of the very people they purport to help. Our welfare system has created a class of citizen permanently enslaved to the dole and made it almost impossible for them to escape that fate.

How can we possibly think it’s either wise or fair for two of us to get together and outvote a third person who has something we want, thereby allowing us to take it away from him, even though he earned it and we didn’t? That’s basically what we’ve done in this country through universal suffrage. We now have a majority of voters who pay no income taxes at all. What do we think they will do to those of us who work and create the wealth of this nation?

What can we do to correct the situation? I can’t imagine any way to appeal to all the freeloaders to give up their freebies. I expect this situation to continue to deteriorate until Jesus returns to set up His millennial kingdom. Only then will we have true fairness.

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Benjamin Franklin, exiting Constitutional Convention:

“We’ve given you a republic, if you can keep it.”

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