US taxpayers are being enrolled in an economic chain gang
Jeff Randall
Telegraph
September 27, 2008
“To preserve their [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude” – Thomas Jefferson
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There was a time, early in America’s history, when its leaders believed in financial discipline. No more. Perpetual debt, which Jefferson feared would enslave future generations, is clamped on Uncle Sam’s undercarriage like a ball and chain. US public borrowing is $9.8 trillion – and rising.
Jefferson, America’s third president (1801-09), is widely regarded as the White House’s most intellectually gifted occupant. He believed that “banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies”, and that “the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity … is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
If Congress approves the Treasury Secretary’s $700 billion bail-out of dysfunctional banks, it would be hard to invent a better example of what Jefferson foresaw: authorised “swindling”. Tomorrow’s Americans and those who come after them will pay and pay for the grotesque excesses and self-indulgence of today’s flim-flam merchants.
As Jefferson put it: “If we run into such debt, as we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts … [we will have] no means of calling our mis-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”
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