Indomitable American spirit not accounted for...

Matt Taylor

Well-known member
Apr 20, 2004
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I received this as a crap email forward. The info at the end of it discussing which demographics voted for who was interesting.





How Long Do We Have?

About the time our original 13 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 prior:

"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 that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes 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 worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these 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:

Population of counties won by: Gore: 127 million; Bush: 143 million;
Square miles of land won by: Gore: 580,000; Bush: 2,427,000
States won by: Gore: 19; Bush: 29
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 tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off 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 40 percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.

If the Senate grants Amnesty and citizenship to 20 million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then goodbye USA in less than 5 years.
 
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Swa j-Ten

Guest
Interesting-

I read:

Matt Taylor said:
From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury
and my mind instantly went to large corporations contributing to campaign funds. Poor individuals voting Democratic did not occur to me until I read the bit about welfare.

Two ways of looking at it, I guess..
 
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AndyThoma

Guest
Sigh... http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp

snipe from....

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.

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.

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.


and more....

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
 

Matt Taylor

Well-known member
Apr 20, 2004
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51
New Orleans
Just to be clear, there is no personal commentary in that above piece. It's just an email I received.

I'd be a total hypocrite to make a statement like that about immigrants, as I have some rebuilding my house. If you're any sort of enforcement officer, you didn't just read that.
 
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Swa j-Ten

Guest
What say we meet at the Borders on Veterans so I can make a citizens' arrest?
 
There have been several individuals who have commente don the issue of emigrants coming into various Eurasian countries and by gaining the right to vote have begun to become very disastrous for undermining the identity of the country as it was prior to the influx of emigrants. IIRC, the top of the list for this happening is the region of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, etc.

The same thing WILL happen here fi we don't stop this nonsense of continuing to give citizen's rights to folks who aren't here legally in the first place.

Rant off.
 

Matt Taylor

Well-known member
Apr 20, 2004
761
0
51
New Orleans
Swa j-Ten said:
What say we meet at the Borders on Veterans so I can make a citizens' arrest?


I'm more of a Barnes and Noble guy. Besides, wouldn't you melt if you had to traverse through such suburban white-bred environs? I wouldn't want you to risk it -- I'll turn myself in at The Bank. We can have a steak before you lock me up.
 
Swa j-Ten said:
pts, illegal aliens cannot become registered voters.

Are you telling me you're so naive as to think that they don't try to vote, and that there aren't fools out there who think they should be given citizenship so they can vote?

C'mawn Netty, you were entertaining at one point, now you're becoming boring in your predictability.
 

SCSL

Well-known member
Apr 27, 2005
4,144
152
Swa j-Ten said:
Interesting-
I read:
and my mind instantly went to large corporations contributing to campaign funds.

Examples, please. Let's look at the itemized funds that "went" to large corporations vs. those that were outlayed for social entitlements.

Then, let's look at the net tax revenue generated by those corporations vs. the net tax revenue generated by recipients of those entitlements, or for that matter, all Americans making less than $100,000 annually.

Then, let's look at the contribution vs. benefit ratio of each group.

(Perhaps even if you include corporate "tax breaks", ie: the generous government allowing the corporation (and hence us, as shareholders, stakeholders, and customers) to keep a tad bit more of what they have earned through the force of their will & ingenuity of their labor.)
 
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Swa j-Ten

Guest
ptschram said:
Are you telling me you're so naive as to think that they don't try to vote, and that there aren't fools out there who think they should be given citizenship so they can vote?

C'mawn Netty, you were entertaining at one point, now you're becoming boring in your predictability.

pts-y, do you seriously think that is the sole reason the tide turned in these last elections?
 
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Swa j-Ten

Guest
Alright, granted. At worst, that might have accounted for less than one-half percent of last term's voting influence. A topic for another thread, to be sure!