Fraser Tytler quote

One of the more startling references to this effect is attributed to the little-known 18th-century Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler, who said:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote for themselves largess from the public treasury with a result that a democracy always fails under 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 courage to liberty, liberty to abundance, abundance to selfishness, selfishness to complacency, complacency to apathy, apathy to dependency and dependency back again to bondage."

All Americans should ask ourselves where we sit on that continuum today.