Morning all,
I got this on another list. It was written by Diego Demaya. Seems to be a
good bit of truth here and it speaks to the selfish nature of we humans.
IMHO, our selfish and fearful nature is often our own worst enemy.
Bob Hachey
As others have observed:
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from
the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the
candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the
result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest
civilizations has been 200 years.
* Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to
spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to
abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency,
from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back
again to bondage."
* Or has Robert Heinlein put it:
"The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to
democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies
throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in
which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal
feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and
self-restraint of citizens... which is opposed by the folly and lack of
self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy
is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for
the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own
self-interest as he sees it... which for the majority translates as 'Bread
and Circuses.'
* 'Bread and Circuses' is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease
for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But
once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or
parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the
plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without
limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them,
they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened
condition the state succumbs to an invader - the barbarians enter Rome.
* Mine was a lovely world - until the parasites took over."