The great principles of right and wrong are legible to every reader: to pursue them requires not the aid of many counsellors. The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. ... Let no act be passed by any one legislature which may infringe on the rights and liberties of another.... The god who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.
Thomas Jefferson A View of the Rights of British America The Portable Thomas Jefferson, pp 20-21
This seems timely. Being honest, trying to question where things don't add up, is not easy. There are consequences. You may be ostracized. I found that F. A. Hayek's work The Denationalisation of Money pointed the way two decades ago, though I had some disagreements. It's a shame it was so taboo in academia. We'd be in a better position today if people had been more open to discussion before any crisis, as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz recommended in 1986 in their article "Has Government Any Role in Money?" I still wish to engage in this discussion as best I can. It's senseless to shun the questions for fear of the questions themselves. Reality is there regardless.
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 land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining in deed 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, 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. Thomas Jefferson - Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816 In: Lipscomb [1905, ed.] - Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XVI, pp. 39-40. Image from frontispiece. See also: Peterson [1984, ed.] - Thomas Jefferson: Writings, pp 1400-1401
David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, speaks alarmingly in this recent video.
Here's an interview of Walker on BBC last year. Walker states,
Here's the key. The fact is that today we do not face a crisis. We do not face an imminent crisis. At the same point in time, the longer we wait, the larger the gap will be, the more dramatic the change will have to be, and the less time we will have to transition. (3:15-3:33)
In my 20s, I felt angry and disappointed in the older generation. Their great economist John Maynard Keynes had said, "in the long run we're all dead." I felt quite alive, thank you very much, along with most of my cohort. We were still alive and faced with the untoward consequences of the older generation's dalliances with socialism. My feelings of generational estrangement are best captured in the 2003 quebec film Les Invasions Barbares. You can't help loving the codgers, but their ideas proved so pernicious, as exemplified in the film by the chaos abounding in the government-dominated hospital. If I felt that in my 20s, 20 years ago, how much more might young people feel it now?
20 years ago... in the summer of 1987, I was in Paris and read Friedrich Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom. Hayek argues that the mild socialists, quite unintentionally initially, pave the way for the more horrific totalitarians by centralizing a vast array of improper powers, over which the squabbling becomes more intense and confused.
As Jefferson wrote, "We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude."
In 1988 I voted for Ron Paul.
In 2008 I plan to again.
This time I have more company.
To the older generation, we must seem like invading barbarians. Whereas we see ourselves as the civilized ones; representing free-market liberalism; defending the Declaration of Independence, natural rights, and the Constitution; and enlightening the world.
