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A
Lesson in History:
The
following was written by Professor Alexander Tyler in 1770 about
the collapse of the Athenian Republic a thousand years earlier:
 A
Democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can
only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves
money from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
always votes for the candidates promising the most money with the
results being the democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy,
followed by a dictatorship."
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The
average age of the world's great civilizations has been two
hundred years. These nations have progressed with 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."
DO YOU RECOGNIZE A PATTERN?
CAN
YOU DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT?
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I
was given this on my return flight home after presenting our
equal protection argument before the US Supreme Court in Bush v.
Gore. The Supreme Court ruled favorably on our argument 7-2 the
following day.
What
I found interesting in the passage was that it was written six years
before the Declaration of Independence. The reason our founding
fathers added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution was to protect
individual liberty and limit the authority of the government. They
must have recognized this pattern of expanding government and created
the First Amendment. They established the right of freedom of religious
expression in an effort to limit the role of government.
What
could help our nation increase its morality more than strengthening
families! I believe that charity begins at home, in being charitable
to one's brother and neighbor. Acts of charity need not be limited
to faceless redistribution of wealth, but should include supporting
those around us.
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