Here's the bottom line: A democracy can exist only until voters discover that they can vote themselves largesses from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury...
We passed that point some time ago. The takers are looting the makers big time. The government does nothing but encourage this. Obviously, this cannot continue forever.
I have yet to see or hear from a strong Conservative a plan to counteract this. I feel this is a real problem. It may be impossible to solve. How can you "kill" Santa Claus and have the takers feel good about it?
Let's leave the one side the argument over who first said this. Let's look at whether it's true.
In 1801 there were no democracies in the world by today's definition, and had not been for many centuries. Oddly enough, one of the closest things to a true democracy at the time was Poland, if you look at it sideways while squinting. They had recently destroyed themselves, but not by loose fiscal policy. They killed their state by an idiotic constitution (and poor choice of neighbors).
So was he talking about ancient history, the classical world?
Looking back to the ancient "democracies" we're usually talking about Athens and the Roman Republic, neither of which really qualified by today's standards, but let's also set that aside.
Both of these democracies eventually collapsed, but I'd contend that neither collapse had much of anything to do with fiscal policy.
The ascendancy of Athens correlated almost exactly with its voting of "largesses from the public treasury" to themselves by the citizens. Shortly thereafter Athens fell into one of the most terrible wars of all time and destroyed itself by bad military and political decisions. But they certainly weren't voting themselves largess during this period.
Rome's Republic also fell apart, but not due to loose fiscal policy. In fact, the Republic didn't really HAVE a state fiscal policy in the way we think of it. The nobles competed for power by providing largess (food and games) to the voters out of their own resources, often borrowed. Then when they came to power they used the resources of the State to pay off their debts and line their pockets.
They eventually deteriorated from politicians competing for votes to warlords competing somewhat more directly. That's what killed the Republic, not loose fiscal policy. The system set up to govern a small city-state just wasn't capable of governing a massive empire for very long.
I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion of the quote, but I don't believe we can look back on a long history of ancient and modern democracies collapsing as a result of loose fiscal policy to prove it. Today's conditions are just too different from those of the past.
Anything in the world can be accomplished by the pile-on effect and the will (usually by a dictator) to employ it. How else did FDR get people to happily accept rationing and restrictions if not for adding them to the actual military threat in World War II? That’s why dictators always love having wars to blame everything on, in a created sense of “shared sacrifice”. Things can go horribly wrong, and yet *by definition* it is never their fault. Analogously, cutting the budgets even when well-founded and proportionate can never be done in a vacuum.
The use of divided and separated powers, and dual government (states and the federal entity) mitigate the effect off a singular majority.
The existence of single member districts DESTROYS that effect. That's because the only way you can win is to get 50%+1 vote. This creates a situation where the losers have to coalesce to hope to have a chance to do that themselves.
American political results have been relatively evenly divided for 200 years ~ any particular district might go one way rather than the other, but in the aggregate, barring corrupt realignments of district lines, we come doggone close to that 50/50 balance that's imposed on our system.