Marshall Sanford: “He got to the end of his life and the quote that was attributed to him at life's end was: A democracy cannot exist as a…”

“He got to the end of his life and the quote that was attributed to him at life's end was: A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always fails under a loose fiscal policy, and it is generally followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed to this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; great courage to liberty; liberty to abundance; abundance to selfishness; selfishness to complacency; complacency to apathy; apathy to dependency; and from dependency back again into bondage. Ultimately, what I think that this budget is about is avoiding that very bondage that that historian and many others have talked about over the years.”