to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority of the population...
CJKent (Banned)
“The more a person needs to be right, the less certain he is...”
“Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
~ James Madison, Jr.
~ “The Father of the Constitution"
~ the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817, expansionist, philosopher.
~ Born: March 16, 1751 - Port Conway, Virginia, British America
~ Died: June 28, 1836 (aged 85) Montpelier, Virginia, U.S.
In a real democracy; the wealthy minority would be outvoted and government would be overrun by the majority of the people.
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Thomas Jefferson declared: "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."
Benjamin Franklin had similar concerns of a democracy when he warned that “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” After the Constitutional Convention was concluded, in 1787, a bystander inquired of Franklin: "Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin replied, "A Republic, if you can keep it."
John Adams, our second president, wrote: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”
James Madison, the father of the Constitution wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10 that pure democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”