Great essay.
About a third of the way through it, I was already composing a response that would point out that the Tytler Calumny is sort of narrowly true, but that it's not that the people as a whole vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, but that the wealthy and powerful few manipulate the system so that the people (or more precisely, the politicians who pretend to represent them) vote largesse to them. The end result - the destruction of democracy and ultimately of the nation itself - is essentially the same, but the process by which that happens is not.
Then Brin spent the rest of the article making essentially the same point.
On a related note, I quite like Brin's novels, but didn't know that he also writes political commentary.