I have a cousin who works for an oil company, comes from Texas, and is socially conservative, so every once and awhile he forwards me the latest email meme to the Bush base, likely just to, as he put it recently, "get my blood flowing." This morning's missive surely did that. I'll reproduce it here:

The Lessons of History??

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinburgh) had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior.

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes 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 worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these 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."

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the most recent Presidential election:

Population of counties won by:
Gore=127 million
Bush=143 million

Square miles of land won by:
Gore=580,000
Bush=22,427,000

States won by:
Gore=19;
Bush=29

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by :
Gore=13.2
Bush=2.1

Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off government welfare..."

Olson believes the U.S. is now somewhere between the "apathy" and complacency" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy; with some 40 percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.

As I wrote my cousin, I was surprised that a well-educated person like him would stoop to spreading this kind of illogical mess, as it is easy to note a number of inconsistencies and other logical fallacies. I'll point out a couple of the more obvious.

For example, a "collection of facts" does not necessarily signify a cause-and-effect relationship. One of the facts that this person left out is that not 100% of the population vote, thus to try and connect the population of an area to saying something about how much tax they pay is disingenous, not to mention unconfirmable. And just what does land mass have to do with how much tax one pays? My wife and I live in a high rise condominium and, on a per acre basis, probably pay a heck of a lot more tax than some West Texas rancher. This isn't even to mention that our country's built on the idea of one-person, one-vote: that's called democracy. If you want representation by wealth or land-ownership, there's probably another term for it, like agrocracy.

Even more amusing is the total non sequitor thrown in about the murder rate, trying somehow to connect that to how much tax one pays. It's much more likely, and confirmable, that the murder rate is a factor of population density, not to a general measure of an area's political leanings.

If you were generous and gave this author the tenuous connection between population/area and taxes, you should also wonder about the method by which these numbers were collected. Western states that went for Bush have large swathes of land that is federally owned. How was area counted in Olson's assessment?

I'm wary of anything that uses the word "always," and you should be, too. Generalizations are bad, and sweeping generalizations are worse.

But what's funniest of all is that this tries to make that point that people vote for what benefits them the most, not thinking that if you follow that idea, then Bush's tax cuts for those that voted for him are as much an example of the loose fiscal policy that undermines democracy as what the author is trying to brand Gore supportors with. And, in this case, the example at least bears some real fruit. While George W. Bush may be for cutting taxes, in his three years in office he hasn't held spending, but instead increased it such that we have the largest deficit now in history. If you want to talk about loose fiscal
policy, let's talk about balancing the budget rather than increasing the debt that your child will be paying for Bush's policies. You can forget your social security, as well--let's hope our parents enjoy it while it lasts.

That's just a few reasons why the above is claptrap, but I'm sure it helps my cousin and his regular email correspondents feel better. I would hope that they've got something more than this mess of unsubstantiated causal relationships to backup their support for Bush, who has been one of the worst presidents in the last hundred years, whose predictions for job growth and economic recovery have to be constantly restated (and not upward).