Last week my six-year-old granddaughter, Clara, ran to her mother tattling her younger sister had just called her the “D” word. My daughter Meagan thought about it for a few moments and at a complete loss, bent over and asked, “What is the “D” word?”

Clara leaned forward, sheepishly looked left then right and then whispered in her mother’s ear, “Stupid.” (Daughter Meagan keeps a fairly tight rein on the Kimmel household.)

Yep, that is the “D” word alright, but did you know the world of politics also has a “D” word? Beginning with our Declaration of Independence and continuing through the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the brave and brilliant patriots that put our Creator’s gift of liberty on paper went to extreme lengths to create a system absent the dreaded “D” word (democracy).

The earliest experiment in a pure democracy occurred in ancient Greece. Without written constitutional guidelines, all questions or conflicts were decided by a simple majority vote of the citizens. This is inherently dangerous to the rights of the minority. As a simple analogy, consider two foxes and one goose voting on what is for lunch. Although legal by the standards of a democracy, the rights of the goose are completely ignored.

Instead of a democracy, our founders created a representative republic operating under the rigid guidelines of our United States Constitution. Our rights come from God, and the only function of government is to secure those rights without infringing on them. Under our American system even the goose cannot be denied life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness regardless the vote of the foxes.

Our nation functioned well as a constitutional republic for 122 years, but took a dangerous, progressive turn to the left with the passage of the ‘Sixteenth Amendment” in 1913. Previously the Constitution and the earlier 15 amendments all limited the power of the federal government, but the “Sixteenth Amendment” granted Congress the new power of taxing citizen income. With a progressive income tax our nation began the conversion from a representative republic to a democracy.

The moment elected officials recognized treasury gifts for the majority could be funded by confiscating property from the rich minority, freedom began a downward spiral. Citizen’s insatiable appetite for freebies drove politician’s to find even more entitlements to chum the masses. This is exactly why and how healthcare became a fundamental right for the left.

Montana’s Senator Baucus revealed last week the purpose of nationalized health care was to redistribute money from the rich whose “incomes went up way too much…to the middle class.” I can’t criticize him for honestly stating the truth behind the progressive movement, but remember the goose has limited rights in a democracy. That is exactly why our founders avoided the “D” word.