Though the Founding Fathers fought a revolution because they hated the idea of taxation without representation, soon after independence they realized that taxation with representation could be tyranny too. That was the whole point of James Madison’s famous warning in his Federalist 10.
Yes, a Democratic Republic is the best form of government, Madison knew that there’s always the danger that a democratic majority would illegitimately invade the natural and inalienable rights that government existed to protect – the right to life, liberty, and property.
That’s why, as the chief architect of the Constitution hammered out in Philadelphia the following year, Madison designed his mechanism of checks and balances.
Madison’s main concern was to prevent the emergence of what Continental Congressman Richard Henry Lee had once called an “elective despotism.” One sure sign you were living in one, Madison wrote, is if legislators ever dared pass laws from which they exempted themselves.
In a genuinely free society you will always have inequality. People have different talents, different ambitions, different levels of energy and willpower, different ideas of the happiness they are free to pursue. With liberty to exercise what skill and drive you have, some will grow richer than others. And liberty was all the American Revolution set out to achieve. It was the unsuccessful French and Russian Revolutions that promised equality and fraternity.
When the new Constitutional government got under way, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton immediately designed a financial system to make the most of that liberty. Given that people have different talents and ambitions, he aimed to create a highly diversified economy that would allow people to develop those talents to the fullest extent possible. Everyone would have a chance to find his own niche and make the most of whatever vision and special potentialities lay within him.
Such a free economy would create a wealthy society, to be sure. But it was also an instrument of soul craft, allowing individuals to become everything that they had it within themselves to become-something you can’t do if being a farmer or a shop clerk or a cog in the state machine are the only choices open to you.
So what would the Founders say if they saw trillions of dollars being taxed away from society’s productive members to provide means-tested benefits to around a third of the population?
What would they say if a family of four — grandma, mom, and two kids, say — lived without working in subsidized housing on welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and other benefits that cost taxpayers over $40,000 a year — more than a minimum-wage job pays?
And what would they say about a society that supported generation after generation of such families on income taxes that 10 percent of the population pays 70 percent of, and that nearly half the population doesn’t pay at all?
They would be horrified by the injustice of such tyranny of the majority, of course. But they would be no less horrified by the waste of lives that never even try to reach their full potential. This is what millions have done with the liberty that the Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to win?
Source: What Would Shock Our Founding Fathers Most About America? by Myron Magnet
