I find this line troubling: "Utah, for good reason, has made it harder to pass citizen initiatives." I take this to mean, in the writer's opinion, the cost of democracy isn't worth the price.

It is true that we have a democratic republic form of government. It is also true that the founding fathers didn't trust the citizens to vote in their own best interests. The third truth is that the founding fathers didn't trust the majority to take care of minorities. Therefore the founders largely circumvented majority rule were possible.

Through amendments to our Constitution we have substituted majority rule were it wasn't originally allowed. This leads me to believe that our current citizenry and government believes that the public has the right to self-governance.

So your comment: "Utah, for good reason, has made it harder to pass citizen initiatives." is not in spirit with the laws and beliefs of the United States.

Good points. We live in a republic, a representative democracy. We need to learn to trust our representatives and boot them if they do something to lose our trust rather than try to take everything into our own hands. Pure democracy creates too many problems and should be avoided.

America is no longer a Democracy, it is purely Capitalism. In other countries, when teaching children in schools about different governments, they describe the USA as being Capitalist, which is correct. We may have been a democracy at one point but no longer so. The officials who get elected are usually the ones with the most money.

Although the authorship of the following paragraphs is subject to dispute, whoever wrote them seems to have captured, at least to some degree, what is going on in California and even Utah.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

@Naruto: your take on democracy vs. capitalism is totally nonsensical. Democracy is a political system, capitalism is an economic system. America didn't start out to be a democracy, but it's nearer now to that than ever. We have virtually dissolved the republican aspect of it. As for capitalism, you don't seem to have a grasp on that, either. Capitalism is also a vanishing part of our economy. It's morphed into a mixed economy of some capitalism, some socialism (Social Security and Medicare), and some fascism (GM and AIG, for instance).

The issue that Jay brings up is voter apathy. Why are Americans so apathetic about their governments? I think it's because it takes more time than they care to commit to. And government officials aren't helping any, either. The really good politicians are experts of misdirection. Voters have become frustrated when they attempt to make sense of it all, so most of them just give up trying. Which is just fine with the politicians.