Tom Coburn: “The Woodstock Museum is not the problem; it is a symbol of the problem. Alan Gerry has done great things for the State…”

“The Woodstock Museum is not the problem; it is a symbol of the problem. Alan Gerry has done great things for the State of New York. He should be praised for what he has done. This isn't an attack on him. This is an attack on the process--the process where we inappropriately send money back on the basis not of priority but on the basis of a low-priority need. Now, there was a historian by the name of Alexander Tyler. These words are attributed to him. Nobody can say for sure he is the author of them, but they bear a very important lesson for us. He wrote about the Athenian Empire which had collapsed, and he was writing this about the time that our Founders were writing our institutional documents. Here is what he said: All democracies eventually fail. They fail because people learn that they can vote themselves money from the public Treasury. Consequently, they only vote for people in elected office who will return them money from the public Treasury. Consequently, all democracies fail over a fiscal collapse.”