200 Years of America?

[Ganonator]

With some of the new political debates whirling about in the country, I feel it is appropriate to post what I was sent a few days ago regarding American society and progression.
VEEERY INTERESTING... At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution in 1787, a Scottish history professor by the name of Professor Alexander Tyler had this to say about "The Fall of the Athenian Republic" over 2,000 years previous to that date. The Fall of the Athenian Republic... "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (generous gifts) from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy,(which is) always followed by a dictatorship." "The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage." Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St.Paul, Minnesota, wrote this about the 2000 election: Population of counties won by Gore 127 million, won by Bush 143 million. Square miles of country won by Gore 580,000.. won by Bush 2,427,000. States won by Gore 19... by Bush 29. Murder per 100,000 residents in counties won by Gore 13.2 by Bush 2.1 (not a typo). Professor Olson adds, "The map of the territory Bush won was (mostly) the land owned by the people of this great country. Not the citizens living in cities in tenements owned by the government and living off the government... Professor Olson thinks the U.S. is now between the apathy and complacency phase of democracy although he believes that 40 percent of the nation's population has already reached the dependency phase. (Information above was verified through Google Internet Search... I'm told!)
Now I understand programs like social welfare are important, but when people are soaking in it? Ridiculous. There are crimes that are unnoticed because of personal political gain.

[Beldaran]

That is absolutley correct, and why the democratic philosophy will be the destruction of this nation.

[Axel]

do you mean Democratic as in the party, or Democratic as in principle of popular sovereignty? Gee, last I saw we had a surpluss with the Democratic president and a deficit with the Republican.

I agree with the first part of the article, about the rise and fall of democracy. I disagree with the assumption that it is liberal policies that cause such decline, or that such liberal waverings entice crime. The statistics are clearly overestimated, probably taken from a range of likely numbers with the most preferable number taken from each. Further the assumption that liberal leanings in cities results in crime is preposterous, it always has happened and always will when you have a large number of people in a small area.
The idea of "gifts from the treasury" could be considered to apply not to welfare, but to tax cuts. Without the rest of the article making it clear that this has no purpose but to bash Democrats, it could be assumed that the support of tax cuts without a decrease of spending could likewise result in the collapse of a nation.

Belderan, do you have any thoughts, aside from Republican ass-kissing? I mean do you actually think any of this through, or do you just parrot whatever you hear?

[bigjoe]

Not satisfying the needs of a population leads to civil unrest and even revolt.

Im not saying a bunch of disabled people in wheelchairs would march on the Pentagon. Some argue that disabled people dont have a right to live. I argue that they should be able to work within their limitations. In exchange for menial tasks, perhaps government assigned, they would be given the bare essentials of survival , until their natural death.

Nevertheless, the government should continue it's research of crowd control technology and chemical warfare. There will be a surprising amount of domestic terrorism if the value of the dollar drops as it is expected to once the oil economy reaches peak and starts to fall. Deployment of the weapons researched against "civil rights" groups will greatly ease the conflict. Either that or, God forbid, the government would get overthrown

In the end, the middle class will be eliminated. There will be two classes of people: Those who work to survive, and those who live lives of excess by benefiting from those who work to survive. The population will be severely reduced, by informing those who work to survive that they needn't reproduce. (HIV has been a major help with that.)

That will last until either:

A.Those who work to survive die out and automation processes take over.

B.Those who have lived in excess develop tendencies of unrest among eachother and form a democracy or republic again.

[Tsukuru]

The US brand of democracy is quite different than any other from history. Unlike the Athenians, our governmental system is designed to make sure there is never a majority that holds most of the control in our country. The Founding Fathers made sure, through checks and balances, separation of powers, and an ever changing constitution that such a thing never happens.

For example, just because someone is in the Democratic party doesn't mean they have to vote for all democratic candidates, thus a political one-sidedness could never happen. Thank goodness for split-ticket voting.

[Beldaran]

Originally posted by Axel
do you mean Democratic as in the party, or Democratic as in principle of popular sovereignty? Gee, last I saw we had a surpluss with the Democratic president and a deficit with the Republican.

I agree with the first part of the article, about the rise and fall of democracy. I disagree with the assumption that it is liberal policies that cause such decline, or that such liberal waverings entice crime. The statistics are clearly overestimated, probably taken from a range of likely numbers with the most preferable number taken from each. Further the assumption that liberal leanings in cities results in crime is preposterous, it always has happened and always will when you have a large number of people in a small area.
The idea of "gifts from the treasury" could be considered to apply not to welfare, but to tax cuts. Without the rest of the article making it clear that this has no purpose but to bash Democrats, it could be assumed that the support of tax cuts without a decrease of spending could likewise result in the collapse of a nation.

Belderan, do you have any thoughts, aside from Republican ass-kissing? I mean do you actually think any of this through, or do you just parrot whatever you hear?

[sigh] Yes I think it through. I'm well educated, and when I feel like it, I am articulate and able to participate rationally in debates.

I am just really tired of political debates so I don't participate very meaningfully anymore.

How can you call a tax cut a gift? If I steal your wallet and give you half your money back, would you say I gave you a gift? Taxes are theft from people who are smart enough and competent enough to produce. Money is stolen from competent people and given to incompetent people. That's immoral.

The tax cuts of the current administration are a token gesture and overall are worse for the nation than they are good for it. You simply can't increase the amount of money you spend and decrease the amount of money you make. Bush is a moron. What he should do, is close all the stupid government programs, THEN make tax cuts. No services should be public except roads, police, and military. Everything else should be private companies. The government should provide the same amount of money it WASTES on our incompetent schools and use it to give poor kids enough money to attend high powered private schools.

I could write a hundred thousand pages about everything I think poliically, and I could give a million reasons why, but it's just not worth it, at least not on a discussion board. I prefer to surf the boards casually and make casual remarks. These casual remarks include political remarks.

So when I say the democratic philosophy (that of the state having a hand in business and using the money it steals to support poeple) will destroy this nation, just accept that that is my opinion and I really don't feel like writing a 200 page essay explaining or defending it.

[Ich]

Beldaran, run for president. I'd vote for you.

[Beldaran]

Originally posted by ICHBINDASWALROSS
Beldaran, run for president. I'd vote for you.


mwa hahaha that's totally going in my sig.:evil:

[Axel]

Originally posted by Beldaran
How can you call a tax cut a gift? If I steal your wallet and give you half your money back, would you say I gave you a gift? Taxes are theft from people who are smart enough and competent enough to produce. Money is stolen from competent people and given to incompetent people. That's immoral.

The tax cuts of the current administration are a token gesture and overall are worse for the nation than they are good for it. You simply can't increase the amount of money you spend and decrease the amount of money you make. Bush is a moron. What he should do, is close all the stupid government programs, THEN make tax cuts. No services should be public except roads, police, and military. Everything else should be private companies. The government should provide the same amount of money it WASTES on our incompetent schools and use it to give poor kids enough money to attend high powered private schools.


so, you oppose welfare. do you have any idea what else tax money pays for? Do you believe that those in office shouldn't be paid, that the government shouldn't be responsible for maintaining infrastructure, maybe the complete collapse of the military would suit you, how about the end of public schools.
oh yeah, you don't believe that everybody has a right to equal education, I say we close all the private schools, then devote the money that the gov't stole from education to fund its idiotic policies back to education. Then maybe we could fix the damn curriculum so that the kids could compete with the rest of the world in test scores.
as for what should be public, I say: police, fire dept, hospital care, schooling, roads, military. Should the government place restrictions on businesses, like minimum wage, damn straight. Bussiness will do whatever it can to cut costs in order to make more money. Without restrictions in place we'd go right back into the Industrial Revolution.

[Ich]

Privatizing is the best way to do things. If we allow competetion between companies for our government's business, we win. Rather than going for what's cheap, or a lucrative government contract for the businesses our friends run, we come up with a more democratic process. Being able to provide the best quality/cost ratio would be the goal, and in the end, we would win twice: lower taxes, better service.

[thePHeffect]

capitalism would not work without government overlookings.

[Axel]

but privatization of schools ensures only one thing, that only those who can afford schooling recieve it, this perpetuates ignorance among those who lack money and therefore ensure that they never move up. This results in an aristocratic upper class, something the founders of this country hoped to avoid.
Of course this could just be paranoia, but better safe than sorry.

[Daarkseid]

Originally posted by Axel
but privatization of schools ensures only one thing, that only those who can afford schooling recieve it, this perpetuates ignorance among those who lack money and therefore ensure that they never move up. This results in an aristocratic upper class, something the founders of this country hoped to avoid.
Of course this could just be paranoia, but better safe than sorry.

From what I've learned, alot of the founders never expressly wanted to avoid having its own aristocratic class. In fact, alot of them wanted voting rights restricted ONLY to those who owned land. The federalists themselves never wanted to appeal politically to anyone but the aristocratic upper class, and they worked hard to maintain the system such that it favored the upper class.

This of course illustrates the folly in wanting to determine our country's direction, because the so called founders of our country all had different ideas of who and what this country would serve, they had a different idea as to how the constitution would function, how to interpret it. They also lived 200 years ago, right before the industrial revolution.

Also, back then, the consitution was viewed as only affecting the federal government. The bill of rights, something we all screech about whenever any limitation is faced, be it on a federal level or just because we want to be dicks and not have to observe common courtesy, was meaningless when it came to state governments. The government of Rhode Island at the time could've easily passed its own laws banning free speech and then going ahead and establishing puritan protestantism as its state religion.

Things have changed immensely then. We should be handling things as we see them, not as our founding fathers saw them. To them, egalitarianism was simply equality before the law, in theory. Today we think of egalitarianism as having the same opportunities as everyone else.

[Axel]

I used to say things like that, but people kept saying it anyways so I figured throwing it in was a good way to make my arguments more effective without saying anything.