How Long Do We Have?
The following was sent to me by a friend and thought it worthwhile to post and ponder. It is entitled: “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 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: 2.1Professor 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 illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.
This may seem an “extremist” and point of view, but when one considers the fact that 50% of workers in this country pay no federal and state taxes and actually receive money back each year from the govt from the earned income tax credit and child tax credit and other entitlements and welfare subsidies coupled with the fact that the most productive citizens (who liberals refer to as the “rich”- i.e. any family with a combined income of greater than about $80,000 in the top income quintile) pay an excessive and disproportionately high ammount of total taxes- about 75% of all taxes- it becomes clear that we are, indeed, half way down what Hayak refered to as the “road to serfdom.”
Will history repeat itself or will we learn from it and ensure that it doesn’t?
January 8th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Did you know “gullible” isn’t in the dictionary?
January 9th, 2007 at 10:28 am
ha, good one. Gullible. But this is not a site for subtle.
Gregg, your post above is based on research that never happened.
May I suggest using the Google Search Engine to check the veracity of some of your claims. There are a plethora of non-political sites that expose these types of urban myths. Here is a good link. http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp
January 20th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Terry,
Thanks for the head’s up. I guess this information I received on e-mail is of similar authenticity to made up holidays like Qwanzaa huh?
At any rate, while some of the statistics were not accurate, the main points of the post are still true and the murder rate was still substantiall higher in counties won by Gore. In fact snopes.com makes that clear. Did you bother to read it?
The
piece quoted above has been circulating on the Internet since shortly after the November 2000 presidential election. We haven’t examined it ourselves yet, but Mike Powell of Kennewick, Washington, was kind enough to send us his analysis, which we’re happy to include here.
1. The population of the counties and square miles of area won by each Bush and Gore appear to be accurate. They are consistent with the election-result map published by USA Today on 20 November 2000.
2. The number of states won by each candidate is wrong, but the numbers given (29 and 19) imply this piece was written before the results of the Florida and New Mexico vote-counts were determined. The final tallies were 30 states for Bush and 20 for Gore.
3. The quote from “Alexander Tyler” is very likely fictitious. His name was actually “Lord Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser Tytler,” and he was a Scottish historian/professor who wrote several books in the late 1700s and early 1800s. (notice the words “quite likely?”)
However, there is no record of The Fall of the Athenian Republic or The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic in the Library of Congress, which has several other titles by Tytler. This quote has also been cited as being from Tytler’s Universal History or from his Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern, books that do exist. These books seem the most likely source of the quote, as they contain extensive discussions of the political systems in historic civilizations, including Athens. Universal History was published after, and based upon, Elements of General History, which was a collection of Professor Tytler’s lecture notes. (of course there is no “record” of some highly classified national security documents either that Sandy Burlgler “misplaced” accidently in his trowsers. But it didn’t mean they didn’t “exist.”
Tytler’s book, Universal history, from the creation of the world to the beginning of the eighteenth century, is available for viewing and searching on-line. The complete text was searched for each of the following phrases:
Athenian Republic
democracy
generous gifts
public treasury
loose fiscal
fiscal
bondage
200 years
two hundred years
spiritual faith
In no case was text identified that was remotely similar in words or intent to the alleged Tytler quote.
4. Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University is not the source of any of the statistics or the text attributed to him. Professor Olson was contacted (by me) via e-mail, and he confirmed that he had no authorship or involvement in this matter. And, as Fayette Citizen editor Dave Hamrick wrote back in January 2001:
I really enjoyed one recent message that was circulated extremely widely, at least among conservatives. It gave several interesting “facts” supposedly compiled by statisticians and political scientists about the counties across the nation that voted for George Bush and the ones that voted for Al Gore in the recent election.
Supposedly, the people in the counties for Bush had more education, more income, ad infinitum, than the counties for Gore.
I didn’t have time to check them all out, but I was curious about one item in particular… the contention that the murder rate in the Gore counties was about a billion times higher than in the Bush counties.
This was attributed to a Professor Joseph Olson at the Hamline University School of Law. I never heard of such a university, but went online and found it. And Prof. Olson does exist.
“Now I’m getting somewhere,” I thought.
But in response to my e-mail, Olson said the “research” was attributed to him erroneously. He said it came from a Sheriff Jay Printz in Montana. I e-mailed Sheriff Printz, and guess what? He didn’t do the research either, and didn’t remember who had e-mailed it to him.
In other words, he got the same legend e-mailed to him and passed it on to Olson without checking it out, and when Olson passed it on, someone thought it sounded better if a law professor had done the research, and so it grew.
Who knows where it originally came from, but it’s just not true.
5. The county-by-county murder-rate comparison presented in this piece is wrong.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), in the year 2000 the national murder rate was about 5.5 per 100,000 residents. Homicide data by county for 1999 and 2000 can be downloaded from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NAJCD), and the counties won by Gore and Bush can be identified using the county-by-county election results made available by CNN. (The NACJD provides not only the number of reported murders for each county, but also the population for each.) The average murder rate in the counties won by Gore vs. the rate in the counties won by Bush can be determined from this data.
By calculating the murder rate for each county and then taking the averages, we find a murder rate (defined as number of murders per 100,000 residents) of about 5.2 for the “average” Gore county and 3.3 for the average Bush county. But since people, rather than counties, commit murders, a more appropriate approach is to calculate the total number of murders in the counties won by each candidate and divide that figure by the total number of residents in those counties. This more appropriate method yields the following average murder rates in counties won by each candidate:
Gore: 6.5
Bush: 4.1
There is a distinct difference between these two numbers, but it is nowhere near as large as the quoted e-mail message states (i.e., 13.2 for Gore vs. 2.1 for Bush). Note that the average of these two figures is 5.3, which, as expected, is very close to the reported national murder rate of 5.5.
Gregg
January 20th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
[...] A few weeks ago I posted an e-mail sent from a friend entitled “How Long Do We Have” and have since come to find out by a friend of this blog- “The Optimist”- that there were parts of the e-mail that were not accuarate according to a search on snopes.com he directed me to. While the source of the e-mail is a trusted friend of mine, I will admit that when the issue was brought to my attention yesterday, that our friend the “Optimist” was correct that there were parts of the e-mail that were indeed not 100% accurate and for this I apologize for misleading any readers. This is something I would never intentionally do. [...]
November 13th, 2008 at 12:15 am
I agree to a point, in that the coddling of the wealthy, good ol boy politicians, and greedy corporations has to stop as well. Fairness has been hindered from the birth of this nation and we probably deserve what is coming. Five years is very optimistic in my opinion, I give it six months.
November 23rd, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Regardless of the accuracy of the statistics that you all seem to belabor, it will not alter the fundamental theory, quoted as follows:
“
“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.”
Given the results of our election and the alarming number of promises made in the guise of ‘change’, it’s easy to see that the electorate are taking us down that very path. So far the promises coming from the President Elect seem to substantiate the movement.
We are there!
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Troubling times are approaching more rapidly than ever. Obama’s constant generalized message of change can mean only one thing; to forcibly take money from diligent, commitment-oriented citizens and give to whining, non-commitment-oriented people.
Abundance does seem to have led to complacency. Ironcally, our abundance is the result of ambitious, committed, free people. Inch-by-inch the Goverment moves in a totalitarin direction which will ultimately remove freedom and ambition.
There is only one thing that keeps any government from from taking so much of people’s money and freedom that they are incited to revolt. That one thing is the knowledge that the people are capable of carrying out a revolution. Private gun ownership is the ONLY balance of power between Government and Citizenry. Don’t decieve yourself into thinking that the “vote” is a system of balance.