What Type Of Government Does The Constitution Guarantee To Every State?

First, the reader must understand that our founders did not want a democracy. History had already shown them that democracies were forms of government where people ended up voting themselves riches out of the treasury. As Aristotle put it, democracies were forms of government where everybody voted in their own self interest. Alexander Hamilton wrote that "democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity." You see, people like the idea of making decisions, but they inevitably vote to enrichen themselves at the expense of others. They sell themselves on the idea by calling it "economic justice." Frederic Bastiat wrote well of this problem in his short book "The Law." He called it "legal plunder." It's worth reading in its entirety.

Back to the point: The guarantee in Article IV is somewhat ambigious. The short notes available from the debates of the Constitutional Conventionindicate that the States would have the republican form of government. The Founders did not want the States to drift to democracies or monarchies. The federal government was established as a republic, and that was that. But the guarantee does not specify if the States were to be republics or if the United States were to be governed by a republic as well. This ambiguity may well be the subject of future legal action as our nation drifts from a near democracy to a socialist form of government.