h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is the postulation attributed to the eighteenth-century Scottish-born lawyer and writer:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following 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 into bondage. "

Thank you - that's really enlightening!

You may (or may not) be right. But can you maybe give some illustrative examples of how our voting to empty the public purse is leading us into bondage?

I think you've got it backwards. All civilizations eventually decline, or at the least are eclipsed by another. The people who write during the end or shortly afterwards usually blame some sort of moral decay or abandonment of a noble tradition, but that doesn't mean it's true. After all, people from different times and places always disagree about what that moral decay actually is.

In general, be very skeptical of these patterns of rise and fall type frameworks. They offer easy answers to complicated questions, and usually involve a lot of shoe-horning.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I'm not at all sure that we should take predictions of this kind from the 18th century. Anyone writing in the 18th century cannot have any experience of modern liberal democracies, and is therefore completely unable to make any judgement about them. Not only that, given that there hadn't been any democracies throughout the whole of history up to that point, it's hard to see how anyone writing then could have a serious view about it. The Roman Empire wasn't a democracy, Egypt wasn't a democracy, neither was Carthage, Persia, or the Huns. The European empires weren't democracies either. It could be argued that some of the Greek city states were democracies, but they also had slavery and women couldn't vote.

The view that a democracy is unstable and unsustainable because people just vote for whoever will offer them the most money was a common objection to democracy from around the time that this is said to have been written. Even John Stuart Mill argued that those receiving benefits (as we'd call them today) shouldn't get to vote.

But these predictions haven't come true, because people aren't as stupid as this view implies, and politicians aren't as irresponsible as this view implies. The view that the current crisis is the result of problems with democracy is just wrong. The current crisis is a result of greed and irresponsibility on behalf of banks and financial institutions. The lack of regulation was also a factor, but to lay the blame at the door of government is like blaming the police for failing to prevent a crime, rather than the criminal who committed it.

>>The current crisis is a result of greed and irresponsibility on behalf of banks and financial institutions.

nnn...I don't want to come over as sympathetic to bank directors and hedge fund managers...but it's not quite that simple. In deregulaeted, free-market, capitalist economy, financial institutions are *compelled* by the market structure to act in high-profit, high-risk ways. It's a case of if they don't do it, someone else will and the 'uncompetitive' institution will fail.

One can similarly argue that the individual capitalist's 'greed' is the result of, not the cause of the economic structure. Some people earn their money by being capitalists. Unless they exploit others to the fullest extent possible, they don't put bread on the table. Under free-market capitalism, one can't be a *little* greedy - it's all or nothing.

As for 'irresponsibility' - well...I'm doubtful that there was much that the institutions could do to get themselves out of the trap they'd set for themselves. It is in the nature of capitalism that it operates through a series of crises. (And you can quote me...or somebody else...on that.)

This is where Regulation comes in. Governments can put brakes on pure capitalism to - for example - limit the amount of risk a bank can take. These regulations have to apply to all to give a level playing field of competition. These days, they pretty much have to be agreed across borders. In a suitably large arena - say, Europe - we can choose to run our economies as a 'Social Market'.

(That's enough Marxism for now. )

Dubya waas a pretty good exmple of Tytler. But Obama appears to be refuting it.

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following 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 into bondage."

So... where's the examples? Take the Roman Empire, the most famous one. It took about 300 years to rise from city state to superstate after which its republican character was subverted by powerful militaristic populists like Caesar and Caesar Augustus who created an autocracy. The Roman state continued to rise for about another 200 years before reaching a crisis point which it survived and emerged from. It only started to seriously collapse in the 4th century, largely because it was overwhelmed by organised and well-lead barbarian peoples whom it stupidly allowed to settle in its borders as independent nations rather than what we would now call immigrants. Even then, the Roman Empire remained a powerful state until around the 7th century when it lost much of its remaining territory to the invading arabs and even after that it enjoyed some renaissance in 'Byzantine' period of the 11th century.

Again: Great Britain. Rose to prominence in the 16th century, became the strongest nation in the world in the 19th century. What brought us low wasn't "abundance to complacency, complacency to apathy", we were challenged economically by a rising USA and Germany the latter of which went to war with us twice thus exhausting us economically and sapping our strength. That's hardly the same as apathy, is it?

Here's another thing:

""A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:"

This is simply rot. Democracy, as a working political system, has only really existed for about 200 years in total so there are *no previous examples* for this person to base their theory on. The Roman Republic and the Greek city states don't count: Rome was not a democracy it was a republic - run by an assembly, similarly the Greek states like Athens were not democracies in the modern sense of the word; they were run by aristocratic males (like Rome was).

Also, when democracies run out of money or go into economic decline due to "loose fiscal policies" they don't fall to dictatorship, they vote in governments that promise to fix things because the previous largesse-throwing regime had stopped working properly.

I have to wonder whether this person actually said any of this. I've heard this "theory" before and it's apparently emailed-around by American Conservatives attempting to convince people (or more likely, just each other) that any expanding of the welfare state will lead to the "collapse" of their "great civilization". Since most people are historically-illiterate this hogwash is taken at face value.

A spot of research confirms my suspicions. It seems this whole thing was made-up for the purposes of political propaganda:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/athenian.asp

And not only is democracy just 200 years old or so, in most countries it was only tried for the first time during the last century. Spain and Portugal only saw democracy in the last 30 years or so. In the countries that have had it longest, it is still surviving and thriving while dictatorships, kleptocracies and autocracies rise and fall.

I'm inclined to agree: this pattern of rise and fall is just hogwash.

As for how democracy will die in the end, I'm betting the Mongol hordes will have something to do with it.. We're due a Mongol Horde soon, I'm reckoning. If the satellites start picking up a large gathering of horses in Ulan Bator, be afraid, be very afraid. (Especially if you live east of Vienna).

Universal Suffrage is even younger than demoracy. The Athenians and Romans didn't allow slaves to vote. In Britain, there was a property qualification until mid-19thC. But the first country to allow women to vote was New Zealand, in 1893.

You've no chance of a sensible democracy unless you allow women to vote!

>> You've no chance of a sensible democracy unless you allow women to vote! <<

Because they vote on the hairstyle of the party leader?

RF

Does anyone know who's promoting the lotto democracy movement?

The idea is to fix the main flaw in democracy, the problems associated with elections by eliminating the elections.