TOWN MEETING (Selecting Our Leaders)

[Koikaze]

Good Morning, Terry

I'd like to take issue the comment that "The foundation of our government was never intended to promote freedom!"

In my opinion, the foundation of our government was laid by men who sincerely sought to insure our freedom. In the 1780's, there were no functioning democracies for our forefathers to emulate. They based our Constitution on the writings of thoughtful people and what they knew of ancient democracies. At the time, and for many years thereafter, the government they founded was known as "The Noble Experiment".

They recognized many of the dangers the new government would encounter and did their best to forestall or minimize them. They even included a provision (Article V) for the people, themselves, to modify the Constitution in the event of circumstances the founders did not (and could not) envision. They were aware of the dangers of partisanship and they did everything in their power to avert them:

  "When the Founders of the American Republic wrote the U.S. 
    Constitution in 1787, they did not envision a role for 
    political parties in the governmental order.  Indeed, they 
    sought through various constitutional arrangements such as 
    separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and 
    indirect election of the president by an electoral college 
    to insulate the new republic from political parties and 
    factions." 
                             Professor John F. Bibby 
                             http://www.fec.gov/pdf/eleccoll.pdf

Yet, in spite of the best efforts of the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and others, in less than twenty years after the founding of our nation, formed the political parties that now strangle our ability to govern ourselves. These people, in part through an excessive certainty that their view of how our government should function was the only correct view, began the rot that now permeates our political system.

The progress of that rot through our system has been inexorable. The triumph of vested interests over the public interest was inevitable, but it could hardly have been anticipated by a society that could not even imagine a Microsoft or a Boeing or a General Electric or a General Motors.

Now that the rot has taken over our government, most of us wonder how it happened. Few of us wonder how it can be corrected.

Fred