How do we know when we are living on borrowed time? A dying human knows when all bodily systems are shutting down. For a dying nation, if our eyes and common sense fail us, perhaps the following warning from Ayn Rand will illuminate us: “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”