{"id":23327,"date":"2011-10-06T07:17:58","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T12:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=23327"},"modified":"2011-10-06T07:18:09","modified_gmt":"2011-10-06T12:18:09","slug":"the-truth-about-tytler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=23327","title":{"rendered":"Largesse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It may be\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lorencollins.net\/tytler.html\">the world&#8217;s greatest\u00a0apocryphal\u00a0quote<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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 candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world&#8217;s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.<\/p>\n<p>Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, 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 dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Apropos nothing, nearly half of US households get some form of federal money or another:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Nearly half, 48.5%, of the population lived in a household that received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010, according to Census data. Those numbers have risen since the middle of the recession when 44.4% lived households receiving benefits in the third quarter of 2008.<\/p>\n<p>Click for full-size image<\/p>\n<p>The share of people relying on government benefits has reached a historic high, in large part from the deep recession and meager recovery, but also because of the expansion of government programs over the years. (See a timeline on the history of government benefits programs here.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Obama may or may not win this next election &#8211; but the left has done one of the crucial bits of homework needed to ensure their power forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It may be\u00a0the world&#8217;s greatest\u00a0apocryphal\u00a0quote: 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 candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23327"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23331,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23327\/revisions\/23331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}