Jefferson, Degeneracy and Obama
Thomas Jefferson was no George Washington, but he was nonetheless quite a brilliant member of the Founding Fathers and perhaps the most gifted writer of the group. One of the things about which he expressed his opinion most often was the subject of debt as it affected the new United States of America.
As Jefferson said in a letter to Samuel Kercheval, written in the early 19th Century:
“To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.”
It is nothing short of astonishing how prescient these men were. Thomas Jefferson went on in yet another missive to Kercheval, clearly an effective sounding board for Jefferson in his thoughts regarding debt:
“[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”
Source:
Jefferson, Degeneracy and Obama
humanevents.com
One Comment on “Jefferson, Degeneracy and Obama”
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"As the National Journal's Ron Brownstein has been reporting, white America is increasingly alienated and distrustful of all our major economic and political power centers - the banks, big corporations, the government. And, for the first time in our lifetimes outside the South, white racial consciousness has visibly begun to rise."
~ Patrick J. Buchanan
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Isn’t it a bit anachronistic to support modern conservative arguments about the market with pre-capitalist figures like Jefferson? Don’t get me wrong, Jefferson was a genius in his time, but he wasn’t a prophet. If there is one thing that the founding fathers lacked, it was foresight about the free-market. That isn’t because they were stupid, but because they could not envision what would happen in the next two centuries; the industrial revolution, globalization of trade and communication, concentration of political power within the industrial complex.
We shouldn’t forget what the founding fathers wanted for our country, because they designed a great system. It’s important, however, to understand that they lived 200 years ago, when slavery was legal, children could be forced to work 20 hour days, and women couldn’t vote. We must analyze modern problems from a modern perspective, taking into account the words of those who came before us.
At the very least, they believed in the legislative process. As far as I can tell, no one has bypassed that process. It just so happens that you don’t agree with what happened.