“Democracy is the road to socialism.” This must be a quote from one of those right-wing, radical extremist, angry white males; one of those who esteem the evil, dead white men who founded America with an oppressive government. Thomas Jefferson, who described democracy as mob rule, or John Quincy Adams, who labeled democracy as unstable, or Chief Justice John Marshall, who identified democracy as chaos. The speaker of this quote will be revealed later. For now, consider the validity of the founders’ characterization of democracy in light of the health care debacle being unleashed on the American people by a government that has disintegrated from a republic into a democracy.

The final holdout vote in the Senate, Senator Ben Nelson, received a payout in the bill of full funding of his state’s portion of Medicaid forever, an estimated $100 million. Mary Landrieu held out for $300 million. Vermont and Massachusetts reportedly received between $11 and $15 billion. This is just the tip of the iceberg of payouts and pork loaded into the Senate version of the health care bill in order to buy the votes to meet cloture.

Senate Democrats defending the bill against an onslaught of cries of vote buying and payoffs from Republicans, said the payoffs are nothing unusual, and in fact are typical. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. said, “That’s the nature of a democracy. Jim Manley, a spokesman for the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said, “This is just part of the normal process.”

The truth is the Democrats are not lying about all this. Buying votes with taxpayer money is the nature of a democracy. In fact it is ludicrous that Republicans are shouting so loud over the payoffs in this bill because they have been just as guilty of the same type of strong-arm tactics in the past as Democrats are now. Because that is the nature of a democracy.

That is why those evil, dead white males in the 18th century despised and feared democracy as they did. John Adams typifies the attitude of the founders toward democracy when he says, “That the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of the history of the world.”

As the government in Washington increasingly shreds the Constitution by refusing to be bound by it, the American people have lost their only safeguard against the tyranny that tens of thousands have shed their blood to resist. Until Americans reclaim the republic and force the chains of the Constitution on their representatives, as Horatio Bunce did to Davy Crockett, politicians will continue to impose socialism on them through the democratic process. This all goes to show that Karl Marx was right when he said, “Democracy is the road to socialism.”