Lord Salisbury on suffrage

westernpromise

What I think he was saying is that you can end up in a situation where 51% vote to expropriate the other 49% because they can, with no heed for the consequences of doing so. As long as they are personally better off in the short term they simply won't think about whether they'll be worse off in the longer term because money is something you vote yourself rather than earn.

We have seen more or less exactly this in France, where Hollande's 75% income tax has resulted in a brain drain to the UK and less rather than more tax being collected.

Ibn Khaldun and a few centuries later Arthur Laffer both worked out what the consequences of expropriatory taxation must be, but Salisbury is the only person I can recall who identifies democracy as structurally certain to bring them on.