I just read this piece by Myron Magnet at National Review – a short history of why self-government was so important to our Founders. What struck me after reading is how fragile our Liberty is even with the SO high of an expense with which it has been bought through the centuries. Yes, we consider it our birthright – but even with payments already, it demands even more. These are the most salient ‘graphs from the post (emphasis mine):
The Founders believed that the purpose of government was to protect life, liberty, and property from what they called the depravity of human nature— from man’s innate capacity to do the kinds of violence that slave-owners, to take just one example, did every day. But government, they recognized, is a double-edged sword. You arm officials with the power to protect you; but those officials have the same fallen human nature as everyone else, so who is to say that they won’t use that power to oppress you, as European governments had oppressed the colonists’ forebears? From Pharaoh to Nero to the Stuart kings, history teems with examples of such despotic governments. Even the democratic republic the Founders created had to be run by imperfect men, and thus even it could turn into what Richard Henry Lee called an elective despotism. So the second great Founding idea is this: The mere fact that you elect representatives to govern you is no sure-fire guarantee of liberty. Or, as Madison saw it in Federalist No. 10: Taxation with representation can be tyranny.
Even if it is done with the “best of intentions” – elective despotism is still tyranny if it oversteps it bounds in “helping people” by taking away others’ freedoms.
This danger worried the Founders constantly,
