Thomas Jefferson Takes Us to School
Jefferson speaks from two centuries ago about the danger of public debt and its mismanagement.
I've posted about this 1816 letter written by Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval many times because it contains so much that is relevant to our situations today.
It isn't that Jefferson had a crystal ball, he was a polymath who understood that universal principles are universal and mankind's willful ignorance of that fact is to blame for our, as he put it, "sinning and suffering".
I was reading some sobering data on our economy this morning, and I concluded that we are living a great fiction that cannot last. It has been so since Bush the Younger began a borrowing spree that was accelerated under the zero interest, cash printing, Obama regime - each using his predecessor as a reason to continue down the path to fiscal irresponsibility - and yes, my friend, Trump added to it.
The difference is that when they did it, it could be managed but along came the decrepit man-sized hole in American intelligence called Joseph Robinette Biden.
Our economy will collapse, as so many have when they are loaded with unpayable debt. It is not a matter of "if", it is a matter of when.
Of public debt, Jefferson wrote:
"I have thrown out these as loose heads of amendment, for consideration and correction; and their object is to secure self-government by the republicanism of our constitution, as well as by the spirit of the people; and to nourish and perpetuate that spirit. I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, 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. Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation.
This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, 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."
Amen.
Here is Jefferson, dead almost two centuries, still making us breakfast, getting us dressed and taking us to school.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Yet Jefferson had issues managing his own private debt. He could not resist buying the latest scholarly books, impressive works of art, boutique wines and was forever remodeling and expanding Monticello. All this had the result that when he died his estate was about $200,000 in debt. Oddly his one time rival, John Adams, was both shrewd in business and frugal in spending and left his heirs an estate worth about $200,000.
Critics of Trump tried to argue that his several bankruptcies marked him as unfit to be President. Yet in each of his bankruptcies Trump satisfied his creditors and was able to continue in his businesses. This, if anything, speaks more in his favor than against him.