Unlike Rome, the West's intellectuals have defended the spread of the welfare state by means of a system of ethics. It rests on a variation of the Mosaic commandment against theft: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." So widespread has this revised commandment been that the electorates in every Western nation will not tolerate its rejection.
-Gary North
http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1121.html
It is of special interest to read the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero regarding the danger of internal subversion. In a speech to the Roman Senate, as recorded by *Sallust, Cicero said:
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor (Barack Hussein Obuma) moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor (Obuma) appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor (Obuma) is the plague."
*Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust (86 BC – c. 35 BC) was a Roman historian, politician, and novus homo from a well-known plebeian family.