Can democracy work in the long run?

Paul Samuelson gets junkmail from the AARP, like I do. He seems to react to it the same as I do.

I won't be joining, because the AARP has become America's most dangerous lobby. If left unchecked, its agenda will plunder our children and grandchildren. Massive outlays for the elderly threaten huge tax increases and other government spending. Both may weaken the economy and the social fabric. No thanks.

AARP has marketed itself as a group of senior citizens who help each other and band together for their common interests. It's not. It's a commercial venture posing as a lobbying organization.

I don't know if I'd go as far as calling it the Most Dangerous Lobby. That would be affirm that the ACLU and Sierra Club aren't just as dangerous. Personally, I think that groups like these are replacing political parties and campaign finance "reform" makes them even more powerful. Coupled with the federal bureaucracy these groups and their agents have undermined democracy and the independence of citizenship. When citizens aren't self-reliant (independent) freedoms dies as well. When things go wrong, as they did recently with gasoline prices, people don't conclude that the culprit is environmental regulation that forces us into boutique blends and prevents construction of new refineries and exploration for new sources of energy. The press blames the oil companies and people think it must be true.

We have allowed our system of public education to sink to its lowest common denominator. We have a generation who expect to retire on the wages of their children, even as people are having fewer children, and a major party playing on the ignorance and inattention of the populace to persuade them of a huge lie. We have a press which is so enthralled to liberalism that it thinks it's being fair and objective when it actively campaigns for a single party and promotes the Big Lie of the day.

We have a lot of life left in us, and we continue to live under the grace of God, but in my short lifetime, things have changed so much from what I learned as a child about what America stands for. We've endured because we were growing. Now we are without a frontier and are challenged as never before by our own prosperity. That destroyed Athens and Rome. Will it destroy the U.S. too?