"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."

This apocryphal political quote is variously (and suspectly) attributed to Alexander Fraser Woodhouslee, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Alexis de Tocqueville, and scores of others. Though we don't know who actually said it, there's a great deal of truth in it.

The particular manner by which the electorate likes to accomplish the task of voting itself rich here in Florida is through ammending the state constitution. Now, the U.S. Constitution has a very difficult ammending process, designed to lend stability to it and protect it from the momentary whims of the zeitgeist. However, the state of Florida has no such encumbrances, so numerous ammendments to the state constitution are passed in every election.

In the 2002 elections, Florida voters ammended their constitution to give pregnant pigs special legal protections (leading to a state that paradoxically now has more legal protections for sow fetuses than human fetuses), to ban smoking in indoor workplaces (a crucial constitutional issue if ever there was one), and to constitutionally require the state to build a high-speed "bullet train" between "the five largest urban areas of the State."

In my own survey of those who voted for the pig ammendment, I found the thought process to be thus: "Well, uh, I like animals and stuff. So I voted for it."

Perhaps the most publicized ammendment that Florida voters passed in 2002 was the ammendment to limit class sizes in public schools. As written, the ammendment had no provisions for actually paying for such a project. Governor Jeb Bush warned loudly and often that if voters passed the ammendment, they'd better figure out a way to fund it too, because it was going to cost a ton of money that just wasn't there. Of course, nobody listened because, hey, "schools are important and stuff, and so the kids should have, like, smaller classes and stuff."

Now, educators and parents here in Broward County are going ballistic, because (from today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel):

Entire magnet programs will likely disappear from some Broward County schools next fall. Hundreds of employees will be laid off. Most field trips will be canceled.

Superintendent Frank Till insists students will suffer under even the most generous budget proposals chugging through the Legislature.

Why are all these calamities suddenly befalling the Broward County public school system? Because the idiot voters of Florida decided to constitutionally require class sizes to be reduced without providing any funding for it!

It looked beautiful there on the ballot: "Hey, I can simply vote the classes smaller!" They didn't have to give even a moment's thought to where the money would come from. Thus, of course, because of the Law of Unintended Consequences (something that liberals should be strapped to an electric chair and forced to learn on penalty of death), their big vote to improve education actually will lead to drastic cuts in education for the students.

And how many pregnant pigs had their suffering alleviated by the benevolent voters of Florida? None, as it turns out. Because of the prohibitive costs involved in bringing their pig stalls up to the level of comfort provided by the ammendment, the two pig farmers who were its targets simply sold their pigs off to be slaughtered. The vote to give legal protection to pregnant pigs actually resulted in the slaughter of those same pigs.

But hey, at least the voters' intentions were good.