"Bob Gardner" wrote in message
news:dvS1b.237758$YN5.161014@sccrnsc01...
David....remember that there is an election coming up in 2004.

Bob Gardner

In 1797, in a letter to an American friend, Lord Thomas MacCauley wrote:

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 will vote for those
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.