Milton J. Madison - An American Refugee Now Living in China, Where Liberty is Ascending: Madison and De Tocqueville saw the nations current problems...

These two interesting thoughts are ones that one should consider. They are important to today's political environment and extremely important to the economic life of the USA.....

Espousing unconstrained majoritarianism, TR disdained James Madison’s belief that the ultimate danger is wherever ultimate power resides, which in a democracy is with the majority. He endorsed the recall of state judicial decisions and by September 1912 favored the power to recall all public officials, including the president.

Madison is somewhat of a hero for me. A framer of the Constitution , he originally opposed the Bill of Rights since he thought that the Constitution was adequate to protect individual rights. He was concerned that by creating a bill of rights that some of the people's rights would not be addressed in the document, that this would create risks and that listing the rights of the people would not be effective at protecting their liberty. However, he was also very concerned that majorities were enacting or prone to enacting laws "adverse to the rights of other citizens". He crafted the Bill of Rights to limit the influence of majority voters and in order to temper the fervor for unrestrained states rights as argued by Patrick Henry and the anti-Federalists on the one side and those that preferred strong central government authority as offered by Alexander Hamilton on the the other side.

So, we also have to consider and take to heart the thoughts of this man too...

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”― Alexis de Tocqueville -

Therefore, Madison crafted the US government as a Republic with strong embedded checks and balances and limits through enumerated powers to central authority. unfortunately, we, as a nation, have effectively overlooked the ninth and tenth amendments which say this...

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

and

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If one considers these 2 simply stated rights, one can see that the American central government has clearly overstepped its authority in many many aspects of American life, particularly in American economic life. The great experiment in individual liberty is no transformed into a central planning model of central government activism. This breach of the Bill of Rights is unfortunate and has allowed for gigantic intrusions and ones that are very difficult to reverse without a cathartic dismantling that in my opinion is inevitable.

Unfortunately, I think that Madison's vision and the people's rights have been eviscerated through single party rule starting in the 1930's and the huge expansion of central government authority in the working of the economy. The foundation of this destruction can be found in Teddy Roosevelt's and Woodrow Wilson's seeming necessary intervention in economic affairs. I am of the opinion that we now have a dictatorship in Washington where economic liberty is being wiped out and individual liberty will begin to evaporate as a result. We will be forced to live. work and eat as dictated by the central authority. We will become dependent upon Washington for so much of our daily lives that the experiment in individual liberty is effectively dead.

De Tocqueville's prescient thinking can be summarized in this quote...