re: Hugh Freeze Quote Ayn Rand????

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This is the slippery slope. How much freedom is too much? How much of a safety net is required?


Well our form of gov't is an attempt to answer those tough questions. For better or worse, democracy gives the people the gov't they deserve. We can debate how much of a social safety net is needed and be existentially apprehensive that we're destroying our nation in some way b/c we decided to give too much or too little to the poor but that's missing the big picture: which is that we have a govt that allows these tensions to be reconciled through spirited public debate and which usually produces a result that contains input from all sides. So while we're unlikely to ever get a perfect result, we're usually guaranteed that we'll never get an extreme result (which usually produces catastrophe).

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We don't live in a Democracy though, we live in a Constitutional Republic. In a Democracy majority rules, our system of government protects the minority. Of course our government so ignores the Constitution as it was written and intended now it is hard to tell what we have anymore. The Swiss have actually done a lot better job of staying true to the intents of our Founding Fathers than we have as they based their Constitution off of ours. Our system of government is a mess because we don't follow the Rule of Law as it was written and intended but that is a REALLY lengthy thread derailment.

A Democracy as we are continuing to develop into is actually almost assured of disaster and extremes. At some point it just depends on who gets in power and how far they are willing and able to go. Government is a terrible way to try to solve problems, it is just far too clumsy, naturally corrupt, and filled with unintended consequences that often are worse than the original problem it was trying to solve.