Tuesday, April 03, 2007

The American Experiment's Timetable

This was emailed to me. It's been circulating on the internet for some time (I love the internet) and according to another internet source, is ficticious in its origin. Just disregard the names and cited texts and enjoy. The election and state data numers are reasonably accurate as far as I can tell.

I don't agree with the timing -or necessarily the result - but the writer makes some interesting points.

How Long Do We Have?

About the time our original thirteen statesadopted their new constitution in 1787, AlexanderTyler, a Scottish history professor at theUniversity of Edinburgh , had this to say about thefall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 yearsearlier:


"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot 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"

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:

Number of States won by: Gore: 19; Bush: 29
Square miles of land won by: Gore: 580,000; Bush:2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Gore: 127 million;Bush: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Gore: 13.2; Bush: 2.1

Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare..."

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase. If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

This was written by a true conservative... If not an honest one.

Ayn Rand had an interesting theory about the end of democracy and socialism's part in that end - that she used in writing Atlas Shrugged. She suggested that the people who carry this world will just one day give up and retreat when their "losing battle" is no longer profitable.

4 comments:

SkyePuppy said...

Europe is already in "dependence".

Michael Caution said...

If I understand your implication, Rand never thought America would be destroyed by the collectivists. They don't have the lasting power to do so. She actually found the businessman who grants sanction to his enemies to be far more dangerous. These are supposed to be the capitalists but instead they support their own destruction. The individuals in Galt's Gulch are not the ones that gave up. Instead they no longer wished to sanction their enemies by letting them live off of their productive efforts.

Also as to the use of the word democracy. America itself is not a democracy in any meaning of the word. Democracy as used in Greek history was understood as majority rule. Which explains why democracies never last long.

paw said...

Mr. Caution, would you expound a little bit on your point about democracy and majority rule?

Michael Caution said...

Upon leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787 Ben Franklin was asked what kind of government they had established. He responded by saying, "A republic, if you can keep it." The Founders knew what was needed for a just system of government was the protection of individual rights. One in which the inalienable rights could not be voted away by the majority. In fact James Madison observed that in a system of unlimited majority rule, "there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."

This is the essence of a democracy. It was the system of government set up in ancient Greece. From the above quoted in the post this was the meaning of the word. Don't mistake it for some diluted meaning for "the right to vote". Democracy is a system of government that describes the nature of politics. It does not describe the means in which that system is sustained, e.g. by vote.