The real danger to democracy is the Democrats | Mike Rosen
Alexander Fraser Tytler was a judge, historian and professor of history in Scotland, born in 1747, who observed that, “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 a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.”
Tytler further observed, “The average of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependence back again to bondage.”
The Capitol is seen at dusk as Democrats and Republicans in Congress are angrily blaming each other and refusing to budge from their positions on funding the government, in Washington.
In this, America’s 250th year, we’ve beaten the average, but this sequence has a spooky resemblance to our trajectory and offers a dire warning. Our founders had the wisdom and foresight to craft a constitution designed to protect individual liberty and limit government. Government is necessary, but government isn’t society. It’s a subset of society and subservient to the people; it’s not their master or their mother.
The American Dream isn’t winning the Powerball lottery. That’s just a lucky windfall. It’s about the opportunity individuals have in this country to achieve success and even greatness through ingenuity, hard work, and personal responsibility. As government at all levels has expanded, the American dream has decayed into the American entitlement, with government assuming the role of supreme benefactor — “sharing the wealth,” as President Obama put it — with punitive income taxes on productive taxpayers redistributed to net tax receivers. When the number of net tax receivers exceeds that of taxpayers, we’re on the road to Tytler’s prophecy. Government policies should encourage the expansion of societal wealth, not discourage it in the name of compassion and “social justice” that rewards dependency and punishes effort and achievement.
Total government spending at all levels in our welfare state is now 46% of GDP, the measure of our economy. Government compassion and charity are fine up to a point. It becomes counterproductive if there’s no limiting principle. The needs of net tax receivers are inevitably surpassed by their wants.
What the federal government calls “payments for individuals” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a cornucopia of so-called welfare “entitlement” programs — now consumes more than 70% of all federal spending compared to 26% in 1960, leading to endless budget deficits and the current national debt of $39 trillion. The top one percent of taxpayers already pays 40% of total federal individual income taxes while the bottom 50% pays just 3%, which is greatly exceeded by the cost of government handouts they receive. Soaking the rich can’t balance the budget, even drowning them won’t do it.
Yes, Americans have earned their Social Security benefits, but the system is on the brink of insolvency. It’s been an intergenerational transfer of income, with taxes paid by current workers shifted to current recipients. But benefits have been expanded and increasing life expectancy and lower birth rates have dropped the ratio of workers per beneficiary from 16:1 in 1950 to barely 2:1 today.
Republicans in Congress are concerned about all this, but the public isn’t. Attempts to reform these programs are politically hazardous. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisconsin) courageous but futile efforts at entitlement reform prematurely ended his political career in 2019, at the age of 48. Democrats aren’t concerned and have no limiting principle on government spending and taxation on the way to creating their socialist paradise.
During the COVID pandemic, the feds ran massive budget deficits to flood state governments with money. This is standard Keynesian economics to head off a recession by creating artificial monetary demand unattached to productivity that invariably leads to a future inflationary spike, as we saw.
In Colorado, especially Denver, where progressive Democrats have total government control, they became addicted to that temporary binge and made it their new permanent spending level, causing huge budget deficits they intend to fill by gutting TABOR and raising taxes. Of course, “soaking the rich” is a key ingredient. Common sense and economic reality dictate an obvious alternative remedy. Duh: prioritize spending and cut it back to a manageable level. Instead, Colorado Democrats are foolishly repeating the mistakes of California, New York, and Illinois, which have driven businesses and upper-income taxpayers to red states like Florida and Texas.
Destructive progressive ideology reinforces Professor Tytler’s explanation of the death of democracies. Ironically, the true danger to democracy isn’t Donald Trump, it’s Democrats.
Mike Rosen is a Denver-based American radio personality and political commentator.