America has given away it's greatest power

I got this in an email. It made me think:


An excerpt from a letter from Lord Thomas B Macauly to an American friend on May 23, 1857 . . . . . .
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A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship.


The average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years.

Each has been through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith
From faith to great courage
From courage to liberty
From liberty to abundance
From abundance to complacency
From complacency to selfishness
From selfishness to apathy
From apathy to dependency
And from dependency back again to bondage
Can we escape this fate?





[SIZE=+0][SIZE=+0]From The Prince by Machiavelli in 1530 . . . . . . [/SIZE][/SIZE]

It happens then as it does to physicians in the treatment of consumption, which in the commencement is easy to cure and difficult to understand; but when it has neither been discovered in due time nor treated upon a proper principle, it becomes easy to understand and difficult to cure. The same thing happens in state affairs; by foreseeing them at a distance . . . the evils which might arise from them are soon cured; but when, for want of foresight, they are suffered to increase to such a height that they are perceptible to everyone, there is no longer any remedy.