Alexander Tytler, for the Three of You Who Don't Know the Name

Reader Ray dropped a comment below:

So long as the public is stupid enough to think they can get things from the government (politicians) at no cost they will be socialists.

How you stop this is beyond me. This is I believe the root cause of the growth of and infringement by bureaucracy into our lives.

This reminded me again of the quotation, popular among conservative sites, that is attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, (1747-1813) Scottish scholar, lawyer, poet and historian who was contemporary with the forming of the United States. (Also often referred to as Alexander Tyler.) I have found no definite link to Lord Woodhouslee for this quotation (and I've looked) but what the quotation says is food for thought regardless of its source:

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. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through the following 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 into bondage

The only way to stop it that I know of, Ray, is education. It is possible to teach people that there's no such thing as "something for nothing."

And that, I believe, is why our education system has been destroyed.