“When the thirteen colonies were still a part of England, Professor Alexander Tyler wrote about the fall of the Athenian republic over two thousand years previous to that time:A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.”1
1Alexander Tyler http://www.mcsm.org/democracy1.html In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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What would you say? We've completed the transition from abundance to selfishness? I think this quote is pretty timely in that, regardless of what you think about the merits of either candidate, the winner promised to give money to 95% of the electorate. The loser promised to buy bad mortgages. Sure, that's not directly buying votes. But when you consider that 40% of the 95% of people who make less than $250,000 don't pay ANY taxes at all, that means all they have to do is have a W2, fill out a tax return, and they receive a check. It's definitely indirectly buying votes.
From abundance to selfishness looks like a good analysis, however, with so many being selfish and a majority of the others being complacent to what's going on I think that we may be between selfishness and complacency.
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