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mpalmer • today at 1:08 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

You know, it's very funny. This is the most reproduced quote from Tytler, and yet you also have these chestnuts:

    While man is being instigated by the love of power—a passion visible in an infant, and common to us even with the inferior animals—he will seek personal superiority in preference to every matter of a general concern.

    The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch.

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hammock • today at 3:28 PM

Relevant quote today but seems to misunderstand the U.S. framers’ idea of what the U.S. govt was set up to be, namely by consent of the governed.

  It is not enough that a law is just, nor that the judge should be convinced of its justice; those from whom obedience is expected should have that conviction too. -Tertullian, 1st century.

  The power used by government…is justified merely because it is a better way of protecting natural right than the self-help to which each man is naturally entitled -Sabine explaining John Locke
Therefore if the governors ever fail the criteria of said justification, the consent is removed by default, irrespective of their elected term length or anything else.

One particular democratic election or another is not the contract. The Constitution itself is the contract, countersigned by the 50 U.S. states.