Hell in a Handbasket: Thomas Jefferson & Our Broken System
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on August 5, 2011
Thomas Jefferson would be stunned at what the government has done to America
Dark days, dark future for America…
Our national debt has catapulted in one day to the highest it’s ever jumped, one in six Americans are on food stamps, the issuance of which has exploded to a new record of 45.8 million. Democrat members of Congress want to muffle or silence grassroots opposition to this administration’s power grabbings and squanderings, calling them “terrorists.” The economy is going down the drain, the Communist Party is endorsing Barack for a second term, students are being taught how to bargain a teacher’s contract, unemployment continues to climb, the biased liberal media continues to drool over POTUS rather than honestly and objectively analyzing his performance, and the list goes on and on.
It’s hell in a handbasket.
What would Ronald Reagan think? What would our founding fathers think?
Straightforward essay this morning from Andrew Cline at American Spectator… Thomas Jefferson Warned Us:
“At some point, isn’t it time to admit the system is broken?” So wrote Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein on Thursday. It was a phrase in widespread use for the past few weeks.
The intro to CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday asked, “As Americans watch a broken government, can Washington avoid economic catastrophe?”
“Government is broken and it’s not going to be repaired by next Tuesday,” Bob Edgar, head of Common Cause, said last week.
Something that is broken does not work as intended. It has been damaged by an outside force. The debt ceiling negotiations revealed many things, but never that the United States government is broken. On the contrary, the government worked exactly as designed.
The party in control of the White House and the Senate disagreed with the party in control of the House. The disagreement was resolved through prolonged negotiations that resulted in a compromise that the president and a majority in Congress could and did accept. Disagreements in Washington have been worked out in precisely that way for centuries, just as the Founders anticipated.
The U.S. government is not broken; it is dysfunctional. That is, it functions, but in an unhealthy way, a way that needs to be corrected. And that dysfunction was the direct cause of the debt-ceiling “crisis.”
Unlike most state governments, the federal government has no mechanism that prevents prolonged deficit spending. Congress and the president can spend more than the government takes in, forever, or at least until no one will lend to the government anymore.
Thomas Jefferson recognized this flaw immediately.
“No man is more ardently intent to see the public debt soon and sacredly paid off than I am,” he wrote to President Washington in 1792. “This exactly marks the difference between Colonel Hamilton’s views and mine, that I would wish the debt paid to-morrow; he wishes it never to be paid, but always to be a thing wherewith to corrupt and manage the Legislature.”
To Senator, and former House Speaker, Nathaniel Macon, Jefferson wrote in 1821, “There does not exist an engine so demoralizing of the nation as a public debt. It will bring on us more ruin at home than all the enemies from abroad against whom this army and navy are to protect us.”
Jefferson thought a perpetual public debt was so injurious to liberty that he theorized a way of preventing one generation from passing a debt on to the next. In a letter to John Eppes in 1813, he wrote, “What is to hinder (the government) from creating a perpetual debt? The laws of nature, I answer.” Each generation would be limited to accumulating only the debt that it could pay off before it died, he theorized.
“Suppose that a majority, on the first day of the year 1794, had borrowed a sum of money equal to the fee-simple value of the State, and to have consumed it in eating, drinking and making merry in their day; or if you please, quarrelling and fighting with their unoffending neighbors.”
If that generation tried to pass that debt to the next generation, “Every one will say no,” Jefferson wrote, “… the laws of nature impose no obligation on them to pay this debt. And although, like some other natural rights, this has not yet entered into any declaration of rights, it is no less a law, and ought to be acted on by honest governments.”
Jefferson’s theory notwithstanding, this “law” has yet to be acknowledged by our government, much less written into the Constitution or our statutes. With no restraint on the accumulation of long-term debt, Jefferson’s worst fears have been realized. Our politicians have figured out that they can benefit themselves by borrowing excessively and passing the bill to the next generation, which is exactly what they have done. The current debt is more than $14 trillion, or nearly $47,000 per U.S. citizen. Jefferson would be appalled.
Countdown — only 458 days until the 2012 election, ladies and gentlemen. When we replace the leadership in the White House and Senate.
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Boehner has to go.
No spine, up against a 3rd rate thug, he failed,.
New blood is needed in the majority of both the house and senate.
Obama is going to falter, unless he buys enough votes to skate back into office in 2012.
If he does, we’re doomed.
Anyone that poses an attempt to oppose the chosen one will have to gird their loins, because the left will excoriate them and their families.
I commend the individuals that are willing to confront the monster that exists in the White House.
I will be surprised to see ANY one on one confrontation with Obama.
He has a record now, and it can be used against him.
He will orchestrate any ‘debate’ that will potentially occur.