About the time the original thirteen United States adopted their constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply can-not exist as a permanent form of government.
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.
“From that moment on, the majority always vote 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, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage.
Its democracy plus rule of law ( right to property and low taxes being an integral part of it ) that can be self sustaining, a lawless democracy is just mobocracy.
Actually, technically speaking, a lawless democracy could not exist, and the end result can be seen in a significant number of (in particular) African countries that have tried to/been forced to implement a democratic system where it simply can not work.
On the other hand, there are also places like Somalia which were (are?) anarchist and have practically no laws or controls whatsoever. I want to be in a place like that, just to see if I would like it as much as I think I would like it as someone who lives or has lived in a country with laws, rules and measures “for my own good”…