Yes, they value freedom. Not only because they don't want to be bothered and bullied, but because they know the power of the vote in a democracy is a defense - against the tyrant stealing your property or your wife.
Voting is not freedom, nor is it a defense. Your property has been stolen, and most young men today will wind up without a wife.
Consider, for example, the Financial Reform Bill. It is two and a half thousand pages long. No one has read it. The Glass-Steagall bill was seventeen pages.
What effect can democracy possibly have on such a bill?
Further, Glass-Steagall laid down rules. The financial reform bill grants power to lay down rules, and change those rules from moment to moment, and no one knows what those rules are going to be. Most paragraphs in this vast document are not rules, but grants of power, thousands of grants of power each of which will itself lead to thousands of pages of regulations by people mysterious, unknown, and unaccountable.
Whether the financial system continues to piss away trillions of dollars, or stops, is entirely a matter of whether the
Financial Reform Bill contains, or does not contain, the LeMieux-Cantwell Amendment. That amendment, passed by both
house and senate, fixes the biggest problem, and if that problem is not fixed, the financial system will continue to
leak money - yet somehow, despite everyone voting for it, has strangely failed to be included in the final bill, mysteriously disappearing from the bill by a process no one understands or can explain.
Government backing for the NRSRO's is, at the moment, still in place, despite a majority vote, the LeMieux-Cantwell Amendment, in both the house and the senate to take it away, a majority vote that seems to have somehow failed to be reflected in law and regulations - part of the wonderfully democratic tendency of representatives to vote for popular and sane laws and policies, and then, mysteriously, the laws and policies remain insane and unpopular, demonstrating democracy to be a mere charade.