Wednesday, April 9, 2008

How Long Does America Have?

Here’s something that we got in our email box not long ago and I thought it was very interesting. If it’s true, than it's sort of scary.


“How Long Do We Have?”

”About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:


'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 Hemline 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 and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.”

”Thanks for reading.”


I’m not sure what to say in response to this. I just thought I’d put it on my blog and see what others have to say.

8 comments:

BB-Idaho said...

This was familiar to me: Went around a couple years ago with a fellow who actually attempted to buy Tyler's book. The e-mail has become something of a legend...
an Urban Legend, in fact. see:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp

Lista said...

Thanks for the link, BB-Idaho. That was interesting. It looks like some of the numbers are correct and some are not. I'm going to show this one to my husband. He'll find it interesting. Thanks for hanging out here on my blog. When are you going to start yours?

The Griper said...

as dan rather would say, the source may be false but the truth may be there more than we'd like. we do see a whole lot more of it than i'd like.

Lista said...

Just like I said, some of the numbers are true and some are not, but I'd like to emphasis the fact the some of the numbers are true.

BB-Idaho said...

The pundits, wags and spin-doctors
churn out all sorts of data by red and blue state. Here's one that indicates the Dem states pay more in Fed taxes per dollar back than the GOP states. Other fascinating
data shows up in the PEW surveys, showing how people in various areas of the country differ in varying statistics. Griper prefers to think of us as individuals, but our collective
mores place us in any number of categories. To quote the poet
John Donne....'no man is an island.." BTW, invite your husband to post..it's perfectly OK, see it every once in awhile.
(Just try not to argue in print) :)

Lista said...

Hi BB-Idaho,

After I thought about this awhile, I realized that a lot of higher income business people do not get any money back on their taxes. Those who pay their taxes quarterly might get money back, yet sometimes they actually owe money instead. I'm not sure how this relates to the "Fed taxes per. dollar back" numbers. How do you make a percentage ratio when one of the numbers is either negative or zero? It seems to me that a number that would be more relevant would be the total tax revenues of each state.

The Griper said...

lista,

"How do you make a percentage ratio when one of the numbers is either negative or zero?"

the same way you'd do a postive.
remember a negative number is but a postive number going in the opposite direction on the line of continuum with zero as the medium.

in terms of taxes and your focus is on the taxpayer a positive ratio would reflect moneys coming back to the taxpayers. a negative ratio would be how much the taxpayers was paying into the government.

if your focus was the government the opposite would apply.

bb,

i don't deny the fact we can be divided into groups. the problem lies, in my opinion, in the group mentality that we are getting into rather than the individualistic mentality that we as a society was known to be at one time and made our country great.

Lista said...

You're right, Griper. I guess there are just some things that I have to think about before I either get it or realize I already know. This whole Email and Internet Blogger thing sometimes makes me feel rushed. So often it seems that responses are expected within 24 hours or less and if there is a large quantity of Email and Blogger messages, than it can be hard to keep up and thinking doesn't seem like an option when I'm rushed.

All a ratio is is one number divided by another. Positive ratios are easier to visualize in ones head than those with negative numbers in them, but I guess what is actually done in the above case is that the positive and negative numbers relating to Fed. taxes are added up first and than the total is divided by the tax returns. Duh!!

I'm probably going to have to think about this a little more, though, before I realize what this number actually means. It still seems much more straight forward and relevant to me to compare actual total tax revenues, whether than some confusing ratio.

This whole group thing is a little confusing because there are several issues relating to it, not only one. There is the group mentality vs. individualistic mentality that you mentioned that relates to Independence vs. Dependence. There is the Stereo Typing and Prejudice issue and there is the Labeling issue, which is similar in that Stereo Typing involves placing labels on others, yet we can also place labels on ourselves. Now that I think about it, both of these things are negatives, yet in the Independence vs. Dependence issue, there has to be balanced.

I would have to agree with you, that our country is unbalanced on the Dependence side of this issue, yet bb is also correct in his statement that "No man is an island."

I wonder where he went BTW. I haven't heard from him in several days.