Voting Yourself Government Largesse

This quote seems to be highly appropriate to today's political environment. It comes from 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.

With an astounding number of people not paying income tax, and Obama ready to take money from producers to give it to them, we're not far from the point warned of in this passage.