Stupidity from NPR caller

A comment from a caller on an NPR show last week (paraphrased as close as I can to the original):

"The purpose of Democracy is to prevent the rich from being able to run everything."

Huh? Here I thought that democracy was to prevent anyone from being able to run everything. Stop tyranny of any sort. All basic freedoms. (By the way, contrary to popular view of many similar callers, freedom to do something does not mean exactly the same thing as a right. EX: Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. You have a freedom to be gainfully employed as you wish but not a right to any particular job.)

In fact, it sticks in my mind that the founders of our democracy (which is a republic by the way, not a democracy), limited the right to vote to white, male, property owners. Those were the rich of their day. Why? Because they did not believe that non-caucasian, non-males were educated or smart enough to vote and that only property owners had enough "stake" in events to be worth counting. One wonders how the men who invented such an elitest, sexist, and even racist systems could have believed they were creating a system whose purpose is to prevent the rich from running everything.

Perhaps the caller was inserting his own paradigm into the minds of the founding fathers.

Or maybe he meant the Greeks. ... I wonder if he realizes he doesn't live in a democracy.