Economic stimulus package

Americans, like a pack of over-excited Golden Retrievers, are drooling over the prospects of getting their hands on some of the cash to be thrown around in President-elect Obama's economic stimulus package.

We should, however, consider this, written by Alexander Tyler in 1787 - the year that the Thirteen Colonies adopted the new Federal Constitution:

"A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury."

Nearly fifty years later, Alexis de Toqueville came to a similar conclusion:

"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money."

The history of every democracy involves the seizure, by the government, of an ever increasing share of income. Worse, every year the proportion of transfer payments - compared to the purchase 0f public goods - increases.

Politicians, notwithstanding the fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch, have come to see the public treasury as a never ending source of wealth that can be distributed to all and sundry (well, to favored groups anyway) without incurring any cost. The politically incorrect term is that they are [more or less legally] buying votes. At the same time, voters have come to expect that they will be handed wealth from the public treasury without considering the fact that the wealth was theirs in the first place.

Except, someone will have to pay the bill - even if it is the next three generations.

We got into this economic mess because citizens and government, deluding themselves into believing that there is such a things as a free lunch, indulged in a frenzy of consumption financed by borrowing. Can it really be the case that more of the same will get us out again? Or would we be better served by accepting the realities and buckling down to work our way out of the hole that we have dug for ourselves? Arguably, deferring the inevitable will only make the pain greater.

Americans are not whiners and do not expect to have things handed to them. At least that was the way it used to be. If that has changed, then the predictions of Professor Tyler and M. de Toqueville are all too likely to come true sooner than we would like.