How Long Do We Have

I'm not 100% sure where this originates so I will credit the anonymous internet for its author... but this is really something to think about:


About the time our original thirteen states adopted the new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,500 years earlier:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature. It simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will exist only until the voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority will always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the treasury. As a result, every democracy will eventually collapse due to loose fiscal policy. The collapse is always followed by a dictatorship.
“From the beginning of history, the average lifespan of the world's democracies has been about two hundred years. During those two hundred years, those nations have always progressed through the following stages:

1. From oppression by the government 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 on the government; and
8. From dependence back to oppression."

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamlin University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, studied the 2000 Presidential election and came up with the following statistics:

Number of States won by Gore: 20
Number of States won by Bush: 30

Square miles of land won by Gore: 580,000
Square miles of land won by Bush: 2,427,000

Population of counties won by Gore: 127 million
Population of counties won by Bush: 143 million

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Gore: 13.2
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by Bush: 2.1

With the exception of the last statistic, those numbers sound like a fairly typical election in which one candidate won and the other lost. But a careful study of the demographics of the areas won by each candidate reveals something interesting. Most of the counties won by Bush were counties in which the majority of the residents were hard working, tax-paying citizens. Those counties had few or no residents living on welfare.
Most of the counties won by Gore were counties in which a significant percentage, if not a majority, of the residents were living in government-owned tenements and were dependent on various forms of government welfare.
Olson believes the United States is now in the "complacency and apathy" stage of Professor Tyler's description of democracy. By 2002, some forty percent of the nation's population had already reached the "dependence on the government" stage.
The government is now talking about granting amnesty and citizenship to twenty million foreign invaders called “illegal immigrants.” When they start voting we can say goodbye to our American democracy.