Ron Paul Talks abt Democracy (22 QUOTES)

* Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy.
* We go about the world, fighting to spread democracy and tell them how to live, but we really don’t have a democratic system… The laws have been made to make it very difficult, because the Republicans and the Democrats aren’t looking for the competition, they want to monopolize it.
* The tired assertion that America "supports democracy" in the Middle East is increasingly transparent. It was false 50 years ago, when we supported and funded the hated Shah of Iran to prevent nationalization of Iranian oil, and it's false today when we back an unelected military dictator in Pakistan
* Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language. As a result, Americans have been conditioned to accept the word "democracy" as a synonym for freedom, and thus to believe that democracy is unquestionably good.
* The emphasis on democracy in our modern political discourse has no historical or Constitutional basis. Yet we have become obsessed with democracy, as though any government action would be permissible if a majority of voters simply approved of it.
* Our country is not a democracy. Our nation was founded as a Constitutionally limited republic, as any grammar school child knew just a few decades ago.
* Our Founders instituted a republican system to protect individual rights and property rights from tyranny, regardless of whether the tyrant was a king, a monarchy, a congress, or an unelected mob.
* The Founders had no illusions about democracy. Democracy represented unlimited rule by an omnipotent majority, while a Constitutionally limited republic was seen as the best system to preserve liberty. Inalienable individual liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights would be threatened by the "excesses of democracy."
* The Founding Fathers sought to create a loose confederacy of states, joined together by a federal government with very little power. They created a Constitutionally limited republic, not a direct democracy. They did so to protect fundamental liberties against the whims of the masses.
* Democracy has become a sacred cow, a deity which no one dares question. Democracy, we are told, is always good. But the founders created a Constitutionally limited republic precisely to protect fundamental liberties from the whims of the masses, to guard against the excesses of democracy.
* The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom.
* The increases in domestic, foreign, and military spending would not be needed if Congress stopped trying to build an empire abroad and a nanny state at home.
* Government, through its taxes, restrictive regulations, corporate subsidies, racial set-asides, and welfare programs, plays far too large a role in determining who succeeds and who fails in our society.
* Government entitlement spending is like a runaway freight train headed straight at American taxpayers.
* While I believe strongly in the moral value of helping the less fortunate, charity must come voluntarily from the heart, not under threat from the IRS.
* We should be happy to hear that Americans are willing to give so much to help those less fortunate in foreign lands. And we should think hard about all the good we could do both at home and abroad if our government did not take so much from us for its ineffective and wasteful foreign aid priorities. True charity is never coerced.
* It's not compassionate simply to throw money at a problem, especially when that money is wasted and does not help the very people who need it most. It's not compassionate for politicians to spend money that doesn't belong to them. It's not compassionate to instill false hope that Washington can solve every problem and respond to every emergency. It's certainly not compassionate to create huge deficits that hurt poor people the most through inflation, as government prints more and more money to pay its bills.
* The dependency on government generated by welfarism and warfarism, made possible by our shift from a republican to a democratic system of government, is the real scandal of the ages.
* America was not founded on a promise of security, it was founded on a promise of personal liberty to pursue happiness.
* The American dream cannot be lived courtesy of taxpayer handouts.
* The big government nanny-state is based on the assumption that free markets can't provide the maximum good for the largest number of people. It assumes people are not smart or responsible enough to take care of themselves, and thus their needs must be filled through the government's forcible redistribution of wealth.
* When that day of reckoning comes, there will no longer be “excess” payroll tax receipts available to prop up government spending, and the risk of financial crisis will be significant. Instead of forward thinking solutions, politicians are discussing alarming proposals, such as an agreement with Mexico to let their citizens collect social security money intended for our seniors. This would break the bank even sooner. But, current Members of Congress will no longer be in office to face the wrath of seniors and their families when the trust fund goes bankrupt. Instead, they will be retired and enjoying their own plush Congressional pensions.