Voting Themselves Money Will Herald Their Downfall

On Sept. 18, 1787, after Benjamin Franklin signed the Constitution in Philadelphia, a woman reportedly asked him: “Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.” And regarding maintaining that republic, Franklin is reported at another time to have said, “when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

At about that same time, in 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinburgh) is reported to have said this to say about “The Fall of The Athenian Republic” some 2,000 years prior.

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

And finally, from a science fiction writer named Robert Heinlein, and his book called, To Sail Beyond the Sunset:

“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. … [O]nce 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…” They’ll vote themselves bread and circuses every time “until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader [such as] the barbarians enter Rome.” as read on the Rush Limbaugh

Regardless of who’s saying it, it’s true, once people figure out that they can vote themselves money, then that’s the beginning of the end of that society. So please get out and vote tomorrow, but do not vote for the candidates making the biggest promises to give out money from the public coffers. Vote for “leaders who will act with integrity and are wise, good, and honest.”