Thank you for your dignified and respectful reply, cockeral1.

Perhaps the whole issue can best be summed up in the following:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, 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 dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

Who penned the above words? If one were to put one's faith in the reliability of the internet, the obvious answer would be Alexander Tytler. Or Alexander Tyler. Or Arnold Toynbee. Or Lord Thomas Macaulay. Or...

The truth is that despite their frequent use, the above text actually has its origins in two separate and independent quotes, and the author of the first half is, to date, unknown. With regard to the first quoted paragraph, the Library of Congress' Respectfully Quoted writes, "Attributed to ALEXANDER FRASER TYTLER, LORD WOODHOUSELEE. Unverified." The quote, however, appears in no published work of Tytler's. And with regard to the second, the same book says "Author unknown. Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli. Unverified."

http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html

Regardless of who originally penned these truths or when they do explain what exactly has happened. Human nature being what it is, it is the greatest blot upon it that men want something for nothing and are ironically disposed to expend great energies upon obtaining it. I submit ever so humbly that that is the cancer presently eating away at the body poltic.

As far as the discussion of communism is concerned, the only reason the "young people" or anyone else would opt for it is that they truly do not know what it is and are totally ignorant of history. They literally want to re-invent the wheel, a totally fruitless endeavour.

As has been said earlier, communism gains power by deceit and retains it by force and therein lies the crux of the matter. NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND would opt for communism but not in their right mind, especially just having been worked over and softend up by the banksters and a profoundly negligent, lazy, self-serving and generally corrupt government that does not even read the bills it passes, let alone enforce the better laws within them, the people have been psychologically placed in a position where they just might choose the literal bonds of the chain over the ever elusive but vastly more promising promises of freedom. Promises of equality fairly gained and not mandated by the vile dictates of unjust men.

The hour is indeed late. The fate of the Republic lies in the hands of basically one man and his name is Dr. Ron Paul. Failing his election, and granted the odds are long given the total medial smear job and blackout despite his considerable and escalating successes, I fear we are to descend into what the prescient American author, Jane Jacobs (who moved to Toronto but is now, sadly, deceased), referred to in one of her excellent tomes, Coming Dark Age. Unfortunately for us, that age looms ever closer as the treasury is increasingly looted by government and citizen like.

The best we can now do if worst comes to the worst is best protect ourselves and our loved ones as all of this progresses. In all my sixty years I have never seen such confusion or fear in the people and methinks great but negative changes are just now on the horizon. Let us hope I am wrong.