Marshall Sanford: “a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. it only exists until the voters discover that they can vote…”

“a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. it only exists until the voters discover that they can vote for themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority usually votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy and is generally 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 great courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency and from dependency back again into bondage. What I think is startling about that is as you look across the time line of history, Rome, it was the largest place in the world at that time, collapsed in 476. The Byzantine Empire came on its heels and yet collapsed in 1453. The Italian Renaissance, as great as it was, came to an end in 1550. The Spanish empire controlled a quarter of the entire known world and yet came to an end around 1588 with the sinking of Spanish Armada.”