Voters and debt | FP Comment | Financial Post: "Following John Calhoun, the 19th-century American politician and writer who developed this analysis, we can refer to the first class as tax consumers and the second as tax payers.
Amid the struggle that occurs between these two, democracy favours the tax consumers. In every society that has developed beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, wealth has been distributed unequally, that is, concentrated in a group making up less than 50% of the population, indeed often a good deal less than that. At the same time, democracy in principle empowers whoever can garner 50% plus one of the votes. To an ambitious democratic politician, the optimal strategy to win elections is obvious: Promise the not-so-wealthy majority a wide assortment of government-supplied benefits in the hopes of passing on the costs to the wealthier minority. In other words, forge a coalition of tax consumers that outnumbers the tax payers."
Of course,
Tytler had it right a long time ago:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great 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 selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependency;
from dependency back again to bondage.
Welcome to your once and future past.
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