The Dissolution Of The Social Compact

 

It is time to do some more thinking with Mark.

 

The Dissolution of the Social Compact by Mark over at Mark America

 

On Tuesday evening, Mark Levin posed a question on his radio show that bears serious consideration by we conservatives, and I think it’s time we discuss it. It’s not a matter of winning any longer, but whether we can stave off disaster. What Levin wondered aloud was whether our nation might be saved at all. He asked if it is too late, because there are too few people remaining who will oppose the advance of statism. Are we too few? Is it too late? Is the America we had known doomed? If so, what will we have instead? Our Republic stands on the brink of collapse, and the question we now face is what we can do about it. The signs are all around us: If we don’t turn things around in 2012, it may be that we never will.

 

Identifying the problem we face is simple, and it’s really what Alexis de Tocqueville proposed when he wrote that if the Democracy In America. Among all of the other important and prescient things he warned, these may have been the two we should have etched in stone on the steps of Congress, and on every class-room door in the country:

 

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

 

That helps to describe our predicament, and this punctuates it:

 

“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. 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, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

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