Welcome to the Oligarchy, Peasant

[brother_dour]

First, let's start with the article, and a few choice quotes:

http://www.policymic.com/articles/87719/princeton-concludes-what-kind-of-government-america-really-has-and-it-s-not-a-democracy

"A new scientific study from Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page has finally put some science behind the recently popular argument that the

Comments

[montecristo]

I expect people to be people. Jefferson personally abhorred slavery, but he could not figure any realistic way, in his mind, to get out of it. Note that I am not saying that there was no such way, merely that Jefferson couldn't figure out how to find a workable way out of it even in his own case, for whatever reasons he may have had, good or bad, practical or evasive. As you may know, Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence indicts the King and Parliament for supporting the slave trade and transporting slaves from Africa to the new world:
He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death, in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.

He has prostituted his Negative for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain an execrable Commerce, determined to keep open a Market where Men should be bought and sold, and that this assemblage of Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die.

He is now exciting those very People to rise in Arms among us, and to purchase their Liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the People upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off, former Crimes committed against the Liberties of one People, with Crimes which he urges them to commit against the Lives of another.

Declaration of Independence (first draft)

[underlankers]

Right, so in other words he wasn't an anarchist where it counted, meaning his own pocketbook. Yes, he did criticize what made him rich, but that just makes him an assclown.

[montecristo]

I never claimed that Jefferson was an anarchist. That was your reading. I claimed that he was not anarchist enough. You may recall that he made some dubious moves when he had power, including handling of the Barbary Pirates and the Louisiana Purchase.