Bread and Circuses

Bread and Healthcare^H^H^H Circuses:


After Benjamin Franklin signed the Constitution, he was reportedly asked: "Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" To which he replied: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Franklin is also reputed to have said at some other time, "when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

Alexander Tyler (1787) re the fall of the Athenian republic
"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."

Robert A Heinlein:
"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."

thanks to jimmysmith.blogspot.com