Why Democracies Fail

   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.

The above quote is often unverifiably attributed to Alexander
Tytler. The second paragraph, "Fatal Sequence", may have been written
originally by Henning Webb Prentis, Jr. (Loren Collins. "The Truth
About Tytler." January 25, 2009. Accessed July 30, 2009
<http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html>.)

You are viewing proxied material from sdf.org. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.