 Now, in studying history, you can't construct experiments, but the United States is about as close to the ideal case of state capitalist democracy as one can find, and for that reason alone is particularly important to study aside from its power and the stability of the institutions. Well, furthermore, the main designer, James Madison, was an astute political thinker and also a very lucid one. His views largely prevailed. Madison eloquently upheld the call for the preservation of the sacred faith, sacred fire of liberty, that he wrote into George Washington's inaugural address, but it's important to understand his quite clear and explicit ideas about the kind of liberty that had to be preserved. These ideas perhaps come out most clearly in the debates on the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Madison focused on England naturally, that's the model for a democratic society that they would look at at the time, and he pointed out that, I'm quoting him, in England at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure, and agrarian law would soon take place, what we would call agrarian reform, which would infringe on property rights, and the sacred fire of liberty that he spoke of is to burn most rightly to preserve the rights to own property, which are privileged above all others. Madison went on in the debates to warn that the new government that they were framing, that they were constructing, has to be designed in such a way to ward off the unjustice that would come from a functioning democracy, as in the example mentioned. That is, it would have to, I'm quoting him again, it would have to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation with a variety of devices to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, the permanent interests of the country that have to be preserved against innovation, our property rights, in particular the rights of the opulent minority, who have to be protected against the majority, meaning that democracy has to be a very limited system.