Barney Frank, Meet Robert Heinlein [Andy McCarthy]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDFkZjcyMDQ3ZmMzMGE0MzlhM2Y2YzQ3NGQ5MjcwY2U=

This morning's WSJ editorial on "Obamanomics" starts with this quote from Barney Frank (and as you read it, note how confident the Left is:  One of the main culprits of the credit crisis, saying this sort of stuff already, just before we vote and before they are even fully in power):

I think at this point there needs to be a focus on an immediate increase in spending and I think this is a time when deficit fear has to take a second seat . . . I believe later on there should be tax increases. Speaking personally, I think there are a lot of very rich people out there whom we can tax at a point down the road and recover some of the money.

It reminded me of this passage a reader sent me a few days ago, from the late, great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987):

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome.