In my last post, I went “Out On A Limb” and predicted a landslide popular vote victory for Mitt Romney. Obviously I was wrong, in spite of Romney drawing crowds 10 times those of the President. I can only think of two possible explanations.
First, there may have been widespread voter fraud in favor of Barack Obama. Maybe we’ll find out, maybe we won’t. Either way it probably won’t change the outcome.
The other possibility is that we have finally reached the tipping point where the majority of people would rather vote for a living than work for a living. This has been predicted by a variety of people, most notably Alexis de Tocqueville:
“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.”
So I guess at 236 years we’ve done relatively well. Still I’m mystified.
The president offered pretty much no indication of what he will do in a second term. Unemployment remains above 12 percent (in real numbers) and the national debt continues to rise. There is nothing in his DNA that would enable him to propose policies that will turn things around. There is pretty much nothing that can prevent a Greece-style economic crash.
But Greece’s crash only affected Greece and inconvenienced others in the European Union. When America crashes, the entire world will be shattered.
And note that de Tocqueville says a dictatorship always follows.
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