At Sarasota City Hall, we recently heard Andres Duany speak about the “tyranny of the minority” – when small groups of vocal citizens with special interests persuade City Commissioners to rule in their behalf at the expense of those who are not represented.

Likewise, there is “tyranny of the majority” – when in our democratic society we enslave the minority. Be it elections that change the constitution of the state by restricting the size of cages for raising pigs, the banning of nets of fisherman, or the numbers of students in a classroom imposed on every county in the state of Florida. When you see assaults on individual liberties like these by the will of the majority, do we not have to ask ourselves where does this end?

Public policy is no longer concerned as to how to solve problems. In recent years we have moved from substance to gimmicks that are simplistic at best or diversions away from the appetite of growing government. The focus away from liberty of the individual has led to the excess of democracy.

As we have laid the framework of the procession of taxation, with no promise to curb government spending, it has become noticeable that there are few proposals at any level of government offering tax relief. Locally there are no discussions to auction the assets of “enterprises” and use the proceeds to reduce taxes. Nationally, despite the lament of the awful alternative minimum tax and our unfair system of taxation, all is quiet about establishing a flat tax, or a proposal requiring the federal government to balance its budget. Faced with more difficult economic times for the individual, where the national savings rate has turned negative, most government proposals have spent less time in consideration of our individual liberties then of growing government and enlarging our “democracy.”

Think back in our nations history to the wisdom of our democratic efforts to control individual freedoms in order to give us better collective benefits. The political mentality of today is closer in spirit to those in our nation who gave us price controls in order to control inflation, gun control in order to control crime and reduce murder, and in the twenties, prohibition designed to eliminate public drunkenness and the evils that were associated with that deplorable behavior. In 1919 when Congress passed the Volstead Act making the sale of alcohol illegal, the evangelist Billy Sunday said, “The reign of tears is over. The slums will be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into corncribs. Hell will be forever for rent.” By the time prohibition ended, the population of federal prisons had doubled and the amount and consumption of alcohol had increased.

History should teach us that until we return to a greater respect for individual liberty and restore an institutional balance between rights of the individual and the essentials that should be delivered by government, we will not relieve ourselves from the dependency of government. One of the chapters in Tocqueville’s book “Democracy in America” is entitled, “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear” where he predicts that it will “degrade men without tormenting them.” At the time of the caveman the individual sought to provide food and shelter for himself without the dependency of government. Let us in Sarasota force a revival of the rights of the individual and the independent sector of society in order to end the confusion between liberty and democracy. It is only through your vocal cry of “enough”, that we can return to the liberty promised us over 200 years ago.