Any person elevated to a position of power must be expected to chafe at constraints on its exercise. But if such a person calls for their removal, or chooses to ignore them, then those able to oppose him or her must act promptly and decisively, lest the leader become a despot.
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A well-constituted government's first purpose is to secure the governed against the usurpation and abuse of power. This, as those who have lived under despots know, is even more important than securing the physical safety of the governed. For some fates are worse than death.
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To affirm life as an absolute good to be preserved at all costs regardless of circumstance ignores millennia of human experience. People have always fought and died to secure for themselves and their posterity a life worth living. Merely to survive is the ambition of an animal.
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Yet a life even less worth living than the mere survival of a beast of the field is exactly what one must fear under the rule of a depraved despot. Which, of course, is exactly why a well-constituted government must, above all, prevent the usurpation and abuse of power.
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It is also why the governed themselves should fear and revile above all a leader who shows any inclination to usurp and abuse power. Yet Aesop's fable of the frogs who wanted a king clearly shows that bored and comfortable persons cannot imagine horrors they've never known.
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Thus it is that boredom, complacency, and lack of imagination may ultimately doom a polity to a fate worse than death. Eternal vigilance may indeed be the price of liberty, but people stop paying their insurance when the evils from which it protects them seem unimaginably remote.
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