Democracia versus Liberdade

"(...) Whatever its virtues, democracy is not freedom. As the 19th-century French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville warned in his classic Democracy in America, a democracy can be just as tyrannical as a dictatorship once the voters decide to vote themselves money from the treasury.

Democracy is a method of deciding who shall rule. It does not determine the morality of the resulting government. At best, democracy means that government has popular support. But popular support is no guarantee that government will protect your freedom.

Conceived in liberty, not in democracy

America’s Founders were well aware of the evils of pure democracy and wisely made the United States a limited constitutional republic in which individual rights were strongly protected.

The word “democracy” does not appear either in the Declaration of Independence or in the U.S. Constitution. Instead, Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”

Is democracy necessary for freedom?

While democracy doesn’t guarantee either freedom or peace, there are many historical examples of societies that didn’t have either elections or legislatures, but in which people’s rights were strongly protected.

Examples include the American colonies before the Revolutionary War ... the American West in the 19th century, where violence was one-tenth of what it is in large U.S. cities today ... many cantons in Switzerland today, which have little government ... and the nations of Andorra and Monaco.

In fact, for centuries much of the world had law and order without legislatures or elected rulers. Instead they had what might be called “free-market justice” provided by traveling judges adjudicating disputes, with decisions enforced by local communities and sheriffs.

This nonelectoral legal system (explained in the book, The Enterprise of Law, by Bruce L. Benson) created what is today known as “the common law” – thousands of collected decisions that provide the basis for law in America, Europe, and much of the free world."

Democracy Versus Freedom by Jarret B. Wollstein (que cita James Madison: "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and conflict; have ever been found 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.")