Professor Alexander Fraser Tyler, a Scottish historian who in 1787, writing about the decline and fall of the Athenian Republic over two thousand year before, said: "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. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith
From spiritual faith to great courage
From courage to liberty
From liberty to abundance
From abundance to complacency
From complacency to apathy
From apathy to dependence
From dependence back again into bondage."
He was, at the time, writing of the fall of the Athenian Republic. When a society bases its political power on a majority vote, it is inevitable that those wishing to have power will seek to satisfy the needs of those who will provide it (vote) by transferring wealth. This leads to ever increasing public spending fueled by the self-interest of producers. With each increment in the common realm, more people are brought into the class of those receiving benefits . . . these people will take their benefits into account, desire to maintain or increase their level of benefits, vote for those who will support them, and thus, the level of spending will ever increase. The needs of the voters will eventually exceed the treasury’s ability, so fiscally unsound policies will be undertaken.
Our Framers must have been aware of Tyler's theory, because they limited the Federal government to a very narrow focus with only a few listed responsibilities. Everything else went to the states. This act negated centralized power.
And then came along the Interstate Commerce Act. The size and controls of our government exploded. LBJ's Great Society swept like a divine wind across our land. A whole slew of lofty ideas . . . untested and filled with unintended consequences.
We are now balkanized, hyphenated and separated into classes. So now we are coming up to election time once again, and the Liberal klaxon sounds. According to the Dallas Morning News, dire warnings have been popping up in the regional press all over the U.S. The basic thrust is that all of the metro areas have been undercounted hence they will not get their "fair share" of the 185 BILLION to be passed out EACH YEAR! The federal government uses census data to distribute this $185 billion each year to states for education, employment and health and human services. A guy taking a government handout should be ashamed, for IT IS a shameful act. Today it is an art form. And today, one spouse works to pay taxes on the other one's income. This affects kids. They are out of control, educationally illiterate and practically ignorant. This cannot last, for the bourgeois will break and our system will collapse. If there is a fatal defect in our form of government, its manifestation is in the two-fold growth of big government and the unproductive voter. All because we traded a little bit of our liberty for some added safety, and usurped the fundamental concept of a limited national government so clearly set out 224 years ago. British statesman Edmund Burke, over two centuries ago, warned of the dangers to any society that promotes the idea that some of its citizens are the natural prey of others. No society has ever thrived because it had a large and growing class of parasites living off those who produce. The growth of a large parasitic class (including bureaucracies) marked the decline and fall of the Roman and Spanish empires. Over the centuries, the Byzantine and Ottoman empires developed so suffocating and corrupting bureaucracies as to destroy incrementally their own empires. Spain used the incredible wealth of the new world to support growing numbers of Spaniards in idleness. Disappearance of empires due to catastrophes have been extremely rare in history. Rather, they slowly but steadily corrode and crumble from within. A growing amount of wealth is pumped by the State from the economy and transferred to a growing number of small but influential (interest) groups.
So, the only way to now put the genie back in the bottle is with direct action by the people. But before we try an armed overthrow (ha!), Initiative and Referendum will allow items such as the Interstate Commerce Act, a Flat (or Sales ) tax, capping the total tax take at 25% - all measures designed to take vast sections of the bureaucracy off line and out of spending production. The danger is that "feel good" socialist programs could also be introduced however, we are now on a decay cycle that will be the death of us, if history is any example.