A Limitarian Political Party

The only question in a democracy is how much a person gets to keep, which depends on how much the rest of us are empowered to keep other people from keeping everything.

Wealth concentrates upward slowly but surely and eventually a small group of people own everything and everyone. This has been going on for thousands of years. Only a few isolated examples of systems that countered this hierarchy exist…and they were almost all democracies.

In the ancient Greek city states the people took power from the rich by combining and making laws limiting the power of the rich to buy whatever and whoever they wanted. The rich had a habit of driving anyone who competed with them out of business and starting wars with other city states. This does not sound so terrible to moderns but in ancient Greece your unpaid debts were paid off by becoming a slave and wars were a flip of the coin if you would come back or not. Democracy was a form of limitarianism in that it kept the rich from enslaving everyone and destroying the state by war-making. It also taxed the rich to pay for public works projects that improved the lives of everyone and also increased prosperity for the rich, who normally worked against each other.

Representative democracy, the Republic, is the best form of government for the citizenry as it provides the greatest good for the greatest number. It is the worst form of the government for the rich and powerful as it necessarily limits their wealth and influence by taxation and regulation. It follows that the rich will never stop trying to evade and end taxation and regulation that limits their acquisition of ever more wealth and power. When they succeed, the Republic dies. If the rich oppress the people, then revolution is inevitable which also leads to destruction. This is the basic understanding of a Republic that needs to be understood by the public.

In America a Democratic party that worked for the interests of the working class, and a Republican party that worked for the interest of the rich, having no third Limitarian party that worked to limit the power of both meant that one would eventually end America.