Democracy Warnings

"Democracy can work when everyone concerned knows one another, shares the same values and goals, and abhors any form of coercion. It is the natural way of accomplishing things among small groups.

But once belief in democracy becomes a political ideology, it’s necessarily transformed into majority rule. And, at that point, the majority (or even a plurality, a minority, or an individual) can enforce their will on everyone else by claiming to represent the will of the people. " (see here)

Thomas Jefferson: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

Thomas Jefferson: "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

Alexis de Tocqueville: "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

Alexis de Tocqueville: "A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a
tax can escape the obligation to pay it." -

George Bernard Shaw said, “The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

As the great philosopher Lord Woodhouselee once wrote: " A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover 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."

Aldous Huxley: "Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty."

James Bovard, Civil Libertarian "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."

Return to Democracy

How democracy is rigged.

Warnings on democracy.

Democracies fail.

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