Downfall of democracy
News ·Friday July 6, 2007 @ 05:00 EDT (link)
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.
The average age of the worldÂs greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.
During those 200 years, those nations always 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 complacency;
- From complacency to apathy;
- From apathy to dependence;
- From dependence back into bondage.
We appear to be somewhere in the 5-6 range, moving to 7.
The above came from a Fark discussion about a survey stating that "nearly 70 percent of Americans now believe the government has a responsibility to take care of people who canÂt take care of themselves." Most of the discussion was around the difference between "can't" and "won't" take care of themselves, and most agreed, as do I, that we don't have a problem providing necessary food and shelter to those that can't, while we deeply resent providing toys for those that won't. Anyway, nice quote.
Imlib, a Unix image library, looks for some curious symbols in its configure script: blumfrub, buttox, and buckets_of_erogenous_nym. Nobody seems to know why.
On Thursday we had Word's two development interns, LM and JY, over for dinner (roast beef, potatoes, corn); I made apple crisp for dessert, first time; it was astoundingly easy and got good marks. We played some video games on the NES and SNES emulators and GameCube and I took them back to MS around 2200.
