HOW LONG DO WE HAVE?
[Compiled from Web sources]

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.

Benjamin Franklin speaking to the Constitutional Convention (June 28, 1787)had this to say:
"In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, — if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and [but it] can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, [they] being incapable of any other."

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.

[Editor's Note: For more on this sequence of decay and decline see:
The Road to Serfdom by Freidrich Hayek, 1944
The Law by Frédéric Bastiat, 1850]

Many believe the United States is now somewhere between the complacency and apathy phase of the definition of the decline, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the governmental dependency phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship and welfare to the millions of illegal immigrants and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA as a Republic.

This may seem an “extremist” 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 referred to as the “Road To Serfdom.”

Will history repeat itself or will we learn from it and ensure that it doesn’t? The results of the 2008 election and the present worldwide financial crisis are yet to be seen, but they appear to follow the sequence of decline.

"Whenever a civilization or society declines or perishes there is always one condition present – they forgot where they came from." -- Carl Sandburg