Free Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul Page A

people now concede that it was not a fair election. Without this victory, LBJ most likelywould have never been elected President, meaning the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War might not have occurred.
    I had my own experience with a “stolen election.” In 1976, I lost a race for Congress by more than 300 votes after a recount. Though we had proof of more than 1,300 fraudulent votes, we were never able to present the evidence in court. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of cases of questionable vote counts in our history.
    Our CIA has been implicated many times in influencing elections around the world. It is not unusual for the United States to preach democratic elections to others. When they occur, if we are unhappy with the outcome, we refuse to recognize the winners and continue to support the losers.
    We have spent billions of dollars supporting elections in Iraq. Many American lives have been lost in the process and massive casualties have been inflicted on the Iraqi people, all in the name of democratic elections. At the same time we continue to support dictators in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and other places around the world. Though we accept the premise that there’s not much choice in how to pick our leaders other than elections, elections are far from perfect. But the real danger of democracy is the ability of the majority to arbitrarily redefine individual rights.
    Our Constitution was designed to protect individual rights, and the Founders knew clearly that they wanted a republic, not a democracy, where the majority could not dictate the definition of rights of the minority. They did a reasonably good job in writing the Constitution but yielded to the principle of democracy in compromising on the slavery issue. The majority voted for supporting second-class citizenship for blacks, acompromise that we paid heavily for, not only in the 1860s but more than a hundred years later as well. It would have been better if we had stayed a loose-knit confederation and not allowed the failed principles of democracy and slavery to infect the Constitution.
    From early on the principle of a republic was undermined, which unfortunately allowed the concept of democracy to flourish. How many times in the past ten years have we heard our leaders brag about our wonderful effort to institute democracy in the Middle East, while hearing nothing about promoting personal liberty, property rights, sound money, and free markets, or a republic?
    How can we “spread our goodness” around the world through occupation and violence when here at home we have squandered our liberties and wealth? American political culture, unfortunately, has come to worship at the altar of democratic majoritarianism. This has made the concept of rights arbitrary and capricious, and individual and natural rights are no longer cherished or understood.
    It is this failed understanding that permits the welfare-warfare state while destroying the concept of civil liberties and personal self-ownership and responsibility.
    Today the majority can do just about anything it wants. If the majority, or a well-organized minority that buys votes, wants to use government force to dictate to every American what they can eat or smoke, they are now able to do it. Voluntary associations, economic and social, are routinely regulated by government even when force and fraud are not involved. Victimless crimes are routinely punished by government, while it pays less attention to those individuals committing violent acts.
    One tragic example came to my attention when a fundamentalist Christian minister came to my office to ask for help for his son, who had been imprisoned by federal authorities. He knew the typical conservative member of Congress would have no sympathy for his plight. His adult son, in his twenties, who from birth suffered from a mental deficiency, was completely dependent on his parents. He had access to a computer and visited child pornography web