To the Editor:
Among the recent letters endorsing candidates for local offices, there appeared one that made reference to this country being a "democracy."
The writer is obviously not a person who has read much of what the country's founders had to say about democracy.
They feared democracy since they knew it was simply legalized mob rule, thoroughly incompatible with individual liberty and limited government powers.
Perhaps some examples of their thinking will help illustrate this.
"Remember, Democracy never lasts long," Samuel Adams warned. "It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."
"A Republic, if you can keep it," Benjamin Franklin replied when asked what kind of government had been created at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.
Readers will search in vain to find the word "democracy " anywhere in the U.S. Constitution.
Simple majority rule is no guarantee of personal freedom since political demagogues of all types can whip up the majority into a frenzy of hysteria against any minority be it racial, religious, gender or economic class.
So-called "majorities" in history have usually been wrong.
The majority saw nothing wrong with laws that kept women from owning property, requiring mandatory racial segregation, classifying gay people as criminals or mandating forced sterilization of people the government classified as genetically "unfit."
This is, once again, an example of what I and other Libertarians have long pointed out, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.
Mark Richards,
West Milford