Letter: Are governments elected by us actually for us?

By Letter to the Editor on December 7, 2022.

Dear editor,

When viewed through the eyes of history, governments have always been designed by the powerful to protect the powerful. Take the U.S. Founding Fathers or the Fathers of Confederation in Canada. It is the same throughout the world, none of these men (the vast majority were men) were of the working class, they were all part of what most would call the upper class and thus when they set up the governments and fomented the rules, the rules were naturally skewed to protect those that were writing the rules, aka the upper class, and certainly not rules to protect the masses.

Does anyone think, had the working class been tasked with writing the rules, those rules would look like the rules that we currently have and are forced to live under?

The laws that govern us are and were written by those that, for the most part, are not us.

What would the rules look like if they had been written by us (the masses)? Would we have the same amount of corruption? Would we have the same amount of us versus them? Would the rules favour the rich and powerful?

I would suggest the rules would be written to favour us and not them, so the question that must then be asked: Are we, as a group, better off with the powerful making the rules or would we be better served had we made the rules? We may never know the answer to that question but it is certainly worth pondering and thinking what we would do differently, and would society benefit or would we end up destroying ourselves?

Using our elections as an example, how many of our representatives were tradespeople or people that worked with their hands, how many were renters rather than property owners, how many were employers rather than employees, how many were and are pillars of the community rather than simply members of the community.

Why do we continually elect people to represent us that are not representative of us? That is the question we all need to address.

David W. Railton

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