Added for you and me.

I wish I could add a point.

It is only a barrier if you allow it. I for one take it as an opportunity to point out that it is just a metaphor for not knowing what the hell they are talking about.

Both Montesqieu and Cicero basically felt that all forms of government would only govern a society until corruption set in and then it will perish.

I think part of what the founders were attempting to do to make our government last was combine various elements of multiple forms of government together to create a form of check and balances to keep the united states from eventually failing. They attempted to have different groups self interest act as a check and balance against the corruption.

My post was an attempt to show how we have systematically removed those elements towards a single form of government and single body (the people) being represented. I would argue that to represent even 1 million people in such a way would allow for corruption as majorities can be played against minorities by a person or group to get what they want. The conflicting interests are needed to keep us from going the way of Rome, Sparta and Carthage. I do not think it was inevitable, I think the founders set it up so that it would not be. It became inevitable with the changes we made which removed the checks and balances of self interest from the system.


As far as everyone voting, I think everyone should be able to have the privilege to vote, but not the right. I think it very important its viewed as a privilege and not a right. That little psychological change helps the people of society from moving towards an entitlement based society.

It does not have to be land ownership, or some value in stock... i do think that is likely a good simple measure of if a person is likely to have the knowledge needed to be a responsible voter. Another system that would also be good, but much less restrictive is to have people have to take a certification test to show they have the needed knowledge to vote intelligently.

I do think if you are going to avoid the eventual doom that corruption will lead to in any society you must have conflicting interests of differing groups represented in your government so that unless (in our case) the states and the people both like something it wont get through.

Enjoy reading more Montesqieu and Cicero. If you want to read about the framers/founders there is a book I would highly recommend over any other book I have found.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-America...

Its by far the best I have found. I do have on suggestion when reading it. I tried to get through it several times and failed, then I approached it a bit differently.

The first section of the book is a couple of paragraphs on each of the participants in the convention (federal and state). Reading this first is a very good way to go to sleep. skip this, but refer back to it when you are trying to piece together who is who as you read the rest of the book. Treat it as an index or an appendix. Start the book on the introduction, freedom - an idea whose time has come. Then enjoy, based upon your comments about Montesqieu I think you will like "The Making of America" a great deal.

So from what I read it sounds like we had a mix of different things. If our founders were influenced by Montesqieu's work. In the forms of government that he presents you have a republic which is either democracy or aristocracy, and monarchy and despotism.
I can see a little bit of all except for despotism in the framing of our country.

Out of everything the right to vote by all citizens has been progressively gained, I do think that every citizen should have a right to vote it is important that they have a stake and a knowledge of or about what they are voting on though. According to montisqieu's writings we were originally closer to an aristocracy since only white protestant males could vote in some states. I do believe that it is important for everyone to gain the ability to vote, but to gain that ability they should have a stake in what they are voting for and a good knowledge and understanding, in other words a good education. The only problem with that is by who standards is a good education? So if you only allow those who have a stake in what is voted on they will hopefully have a goodly knowledge about those things that effect them when they vote.

I do think a good way would be to allow those who have a stake in the laws and regulations that may or may not be imposed on them the ability to vote.

In the end by montesqieu's writings we have at least got a democratic republic which is still in essence a republic none the less.

Montesqieu's writings are actually pretty good reads and look forward to more. I will look into Cicero from the Greek empire as well. Let me know if I am not understanding something correctly.

Edit: I would also like to add that Montesqieu adds at the end of his The Spirit of the Laws: "As all human things have an end, the state we are speaking of will lose its liberty, it will perish. Have not Rome, Sparta, and Carthage perished? It will perish when the legislative power shall be more corrupted than the executive." So it may be an inevitability that the United States that the framers made will pass on. The thing we can hope for is that something else will be filled with another freedom loving people and country.

When enterprise starts to have a negative connotation, people like us are just better off leaving.

I totally get your point, conscious1978 and salta, that we ought to be as clear as possible in our communications with outsiders. If we really want to be clear, we need to avoid the Marxist term "capitalism" altogether and stick to free enterprise.

JB, you raise a good point, but I don't worry too much about folks in the Gulch misunderstanding. A better case could be made that moochers already think of capitalism as crapitalism - for different reasons....

Still, there are those out there that are just becoming "conscious" of the importance of philosophy in their lives; they have been raised in a 'sound bite' world that has stunted their hearing. They can 'sense' things are screwed up today on many levels and are trying to figure things out. It's easy for them to get disillusioned. I owe it to myself to communicate with them in as clear a manner as possible. In your profession, I'm sure you meet people like this all the time.

With all due respect, I'm not trying to contest you personally - just explaining my rationale. ;)

I don't mean any offense, but if people can't read carefully enough, they aren't worth worrying about. They don't belong in the Gulch. If you someone misreads "crapitalism" as capitalism, then likely they are going to be moochers anyway.

There is a problem with the word "crapitalism" in written text. When reading fast it is easy to miss one extra letter, and then the meaning and intent of the sentence could be reversed.
That can be dangerous. The writer always knows what they meant, but cannot tell what meaning the reader walks away with.

I still think that crapitalism is a valid term. I would modify Stossel's definition, however, to when business owners (as opposed to capitalists) collude with politicians for favors.

I saw Stossel's show on "crapitalism" last night. It was disappointing to see the term used. Although, "we" get the joke of its usage, I would suggest that most people just hear it as a commentary _on_ capitalism. He mentioned, at some point, that is was when "capitalists" collude with politicians for favors. And again, I winced as the concept of a capitalist was associated with corruption. I'm certainly not the 'word police', but this demonstrates a lack of precision needed when describing this kind of corruption. When you decide to collude with someone in government to gain an unfair advantage, you just moved from capitalist to criminal (or unethical, at the least.) Rescuing capitalism is already an uphill battle - handle with care.

Rand offered a clear understanding of why capitalism is so important in her 1965 essay, _What Is Capitalism?_

She wrote:

"Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned."
....
"The _moral_ justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve "the common good." It is true that capitalism does---if that catch-phrase has any meaning---but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man's rational nature, that it protects man's survival _qua_ man, and that its ruling principle is: _justice._"
....
"Of all the social systems in mankind's history, _capitalism is the only system based on an objective theory of values._"
....
"The objective theory of values is the only moral theory incompatible with rule by force. Capitalism is the only system based implicitly on an objective theory of values---and the historic tragedy is that this has never been made explicit."

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toc...

Did a quick search and turned one up, more will be out there. This shows my age a bit, but I had to go to libraries to find the articles, books and essays when I was reading some of his work. Its been a long time.

Edit: Also if your interested Cicero from the Greek empire had a significant influence and was quoted by many of our founders (Thomas Payne and Jefferson in particular). Cicero felt democracy the worst form of government because at some point a majority figured out they could get whatever they wanted from a minority and that principle was guaranteed to bring about its destruction. Cicero saw many different styles of governments in the Greek city states which I think gave him an understanding of different governments well ahead of his time.

Great quotes. Thanks. It all kind of sounds like an abstract description of strawman arguments and the fallacy of equivocation explaining the harm they do. I run into those a lot in LDS apologetics.

Do you have any links to his original works?

I would actually change the land owner slightly. Its the right idea but you bring up the reason I would change it.

Rather than simply being a land owner (becuase we would have people owning one square foot of land and some one like George Soros (spelling likely wrong) would give away square inch plots to get the masses voting. I would change it to land or stock in a US based company equal to the value that of the average entry level home in the country.

Basically maintains the idea that you need to have some ownership of the country before you gain the right to vote.

Edit: Oh and I posted to another with what I remember each of the changes to be. Its been a while since I looked them up, but the other two are line items inside other laws that were passed.

If the body of citizens that make up the republic is those we elect to congress then what the difference between a republic and representative democracy? That body would exist in both forms of government.

You can read some of Montesqieu's work if you want to dig into it more deeply. He was a significant influence on our founders as many referenced his writings about government in there own letters and writings. A decade ago when I was doing a lot of reading on different government types I read a few of his esseys. They are rather dry and translated from 18th century french which makes them even harder reading. :). I cant say I made it though very much of his work. It was far more interesting to read things from Jefferson that referenced his work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montesquieu...

Not at all. Feel free, and it may be a good idea to find the actually amendments and laws that changed it all.

Senate is easy as it was the 17th amendment, the president was a law change that occurred just after the civil war and the land owner change was berried in the women's suffrage bill that gave women the right to vote if I remember correctly.

You are correct, I cannot remember the law where they changed it from the electoral collage actually being a group of people to being a number of votes each state had for the president, but it was shortly after the civil war.

...and if you don't agree on what words mean, you and your opponent are essentially speaking different languages. But, then, you'll never know, will you? You'll just feel frustrated because you can't understand why you can't get your concepts across. I'm not just being pedantic; there is no other way to successfully communicate. Words are the tools of knowledge and without agreement on the meaning of words, no knowledge can be transferred. As Blarman noted above, dictionaries (and, I'll add, thesauri) are there to aid the process of discourse.

An excellent description of the original republic ideal and how it has been transformed. I don't know that I've seen it described as clearly and succinctly anywhere else. Hope you don't mind if I pass this along as an example of understanding how the country has changed.

At some point you may also have to be prepared to defend your dictionary. One of the consequences of human advancement is that word usage is evolving much faster than nature.

CG, it seems that any time there is a popularized combination of a negative concept describing / introducing a positive one, then the positive concept 'loses' in the long run. That's why I think it is easy for us to see the "downside".

...and by digressing into defining some label, we would be doing neither (even if we win the definition battle!)

Kind of crazy when you put it that way.