Unfortunately, whatever hopes the original thirteen States may have had for the establishment of a Republic under the Articles of Confederation were dashed upon the rocks of democracy by the 1787 Constitution. While some, like Madison spoke critically of democracy, they did indeed create one, largely perhaps because most, like Jefferson, had little or no understanding of the difference between governmental forms. Just calling it a Republic did not make it so.

There were doubtless some who had an inkling of what constituted republican FORM, like the member of the Con-Con who warned that what they were proposing might someday result in a Congress of more than fifty members! There was probably as much anti-Federalist writing as pro, but I see very little real understanding even there. Many just saw that the whole concept of a "supreme law" central government was wrong, subordinating the formerly sovereign states thereto. Some doubtless foresaw the threat that the Roman judicial system created, as well as the Roman Senate, kind of a House of Lords but with non-hereditary titles (until of late). Then the creation of an Imperial Presidency certainly had no republican appeal, resulting in non-recognition of the ten US Presidents who preceded Washington (and the five UC Presidents who preceded them)...

Under the Articles there was a uni-cameral Congress, quite sufficient, from which the Presidents were chosen, not democratically elected as under the Constitution. And the Presidents, like Justices, were chosen for single year terms with no right of succession. This was an unwanted block to personal ambition by so many of the Founding Scoundrels and had to be and was abandoned.

As far as a modern day "democratic" threat to our economic well being is concerned, all nations are well past any dictatorship of the proletariat. GATT, NAFTA, the WTO, and now FTAA have taken charge of bringing all nations down to third world status, particularly the US and western Europe. There is still heard a childish shrill over US non-ratification of Kyoto when the US has long abandoned its former industrial might. A glance at the DJI list of 30 industrials shows that we no longer have 30 industrials without including several banks, retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, hamburger flippers like McDonalds, entertainment ticklers like Disney, perhaps to ease our sense of loss of real industrials. No steel mills left on the list, and the two auto manufacturers derive most of their income from the financing of their sales of foreign-made autos. Back during the Carter administration, under the seventh GATT perhaps, we made the fatal transition from "world's largest creditor nation" to "world's largest debtor nation." It has only gotten worse since then.

As noted, it is certainly correct that when you reward indigence, slothfulness and wastefulness, you get a lot more of such activity. Penalizing industry and thrift make those activities highly unpopular. The result might be that the free market will entirely vanish, an absence of any form of voluntary exchange of goods and services, while involuntary exchange with everyone eventually being on a government payroll may flourish. Actually with at least two-thirds of stock ownership of traded corporations now in government portfolios (see www.cafrman.com) we are well down the road to out-communizing the Communists with our Fascist/Communist hybrid system. So will any concept of a "free market" go the way of other out-of-fashion notions? Or might the whole sordid mess collapse? If we are to have a slave state we will have to eventually all be treated as slaves. It would seem that all the needed governmental mechanisms for accomplishing this are already in place.

As for an answer to democracy, it is really only necessary to institute the republican FORM of government, something we have never had. "The first rule of government is that all its rules shall have been agreed upon by everyone." Under the Articles of Confederation no change could be accomplished without the concurrence of every state. The fact that one state boycotted the entire Con-Con in 1787 makes the validity of the Constitution rather doubtful.

The genesis of a Republic is found in Exodus 18:21 where it speaks of "judges of thousands, judges of hundreds, judges of fifties, judges of tens." In different translations of the true, unalterable word of God instead of judges it may say rulers, or chiefs, etc. Jumping to Saxon England (Isaac's Sons) from ancient Israel we have the basic ten-family political unite called a "tun." Ten tuns come under jurisdiction of a Hundred court. Such courts still function in some of our southern states. The "fifty" in Exodus 18:21 apparently referred to the size of councils and the "thousand" stands for the general populace.

Jumping to the New World, under the Iroquois Constitution (Algonquin Confederation) which was the inspiration for our Articles of Confederation of 1777, it was the women of the clan who selected one man to sit in the first council. We could go from the "tun" to the Congress in five or six levels, councils along the way representing wards, cities, counties, states, whatever is needed to handle very limited amounts of delegated sovereignty.