5000 Year Leap (30 page)

   The same permanence attaches to the responsibility which parents have for minor children. As Locke said:

   "The subjection of a minor places in the father a temporary government which terminates with the minority of the child.... The nourishment and education of their children [during their minority] is a charge so incumbent on parents for their children's good,
that nothing can absolve them from taking care of it
."
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   It will be appreciated that the strength and stability of the family is of such vital importance to the culture that any action by the government to debilitate or cause dislocation in the normal trilateral structure of the family becomes, not merely a threat to the family involved, but a menace to the very foundations of society itself.

   "Think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty." (Benjamin Franklin)

   
   "Think what you do when you run in debt; you give to
   another the power over your liberty." -- Benjamin Franklin

   Slavery or involuntary servitude is the result of either subjugation by conquest or succumbing to the bondage of debt.

   Debt, of course, is simply borrowing against the future. It exchanges a present advantage for a future obligation. It will require not only the return of the original advance of funds, but a substantial compensation to the creditor for the use of his money.

   The Founders knew that borrowing can be an honorable procedure in a time of crisis, but they deplored it just the same. They looked upon it as a temporary handicap which should be alleviated at the earliest possible moment. They had undergone sufficient experience with debt to see its corrosive and debilitating effect, which tends to corrupt both individuals and nations.

   In the case of the individual, excessive debt greatly curtails the freedom of the debtor. It benumbs his spirit, He often feels hesitant to seek a new location or change a profession. He passes up financial opportunities which a free man might risk. Heavy debt introduces an element of taint into a man's search for happiness. There seems to be a perpetual burden every waking hour. There is a sense of being perpetually threatened as he rides the razor's edge of potential disaster.

   There is also the sense of waste -- much like the man who has to make payments on a dead horse. It is money spent for pleasures or even needs that are long since past, It often means sleepless nights, recoiling under the burden of a grinding weight which is constantly increasing with every tick of the clock, and often at usurious rates.

   The Founding Fathers belonged to an age when debt was recognized for the ugly spectre that it really is. They considered frugality a virtue, and even when an emergency compelled them to borrow, they believed in borrowing frugally and paying back promptly. Nearly everyone finds it to his advantage or absolute necessity to borrow on occasion. Debt becomes the only available means -- a necessary evil. Nevertheless, the Founders wanted the nature of debt to be recognized for what it is: evil, because it is a form of bondage.

   As Thomas Jefferson wrote:

   "The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it would make our country one of the happiest on earth. Experience during the war proved this; and I think every man will remember that, under all the privations it obliged him to submit to during that period, he slept sounder and awoke happier than he can do now."
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   The Founders felt that the worst kind of debt is that which results from "splurge" borrowing -- going into debt to enjoy the temporary luxury of extravagantly living "beyond one's means." They knew the seductive snare which this possibility presents to the person who is watching other people do it. The English author William Makepeace Thackeray reflected those feelings when he wrote these words in Vanity Fair: "How well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt: how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds."
290

   But, of course, all the reveling and apparitions of debt financed prosperity disappear like a morning mist when it comes time to pay, Extravagant living, waste, and hazardous borrowing against the future can reduce the best of us to bankruptcy, abject poverty, and even gnawing hunger from lack of the most basic necessities of life. Universal human experience verifies the bitter reality of the parable of the prodigal son, who "would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat" (Luke 15:16).

   The kind of frugality for which the Founders were famous was rooted in the conviction that debt should be abhorred like a plague. They perceived excessive indebtedness as a form of cultural disease.

   One of the Founders who made his fortune through frugality and financial discipline was Benjamin Franklin. He had this to say concerning splurge spending:

   "But what madness must it be to
run in debt
for these superfluities! We are offered, by the terms of this vendue,
six months' credit
; and that perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But, ah, think what you do when you run in debt;
you give to another power over your liberty
. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him; you will make poor pitiful sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose your veracity, and sink into base downright lying; for, as
Poor Richard
says,
the second vice is lying, the first is running in debt
. And again, to the same purpose, lying rides upon debt's back. Whereas a freeborn
Englishman
ought not to be ashamed or afraid to see or speak to any man living. But poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue:
'Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright
, as
Poor Richard
truly says."
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   The pioneers of the American commonwealth had the wisdom born of experience to know that the debts of a nation are no different from the debts of an individual. The fact that the indebtedness is shared by the whole people makes it no less ominous. The Founders knew that dire circumstances, such as war or other emergency, could force a nation to borrow, so they authorized the federal government to do so in Article I of the Constitution. Nevertheless, they considered it a matter of supreme importance for the survival of a free people to get out of debt and enjoy complete solvency in order to prosper.

   This is reflected in the declaration of Thomas Jefferson when he said:

   "I, however, place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared."
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   It has always been popular in some countries to justify the practice of passing on the debts incurred by one generation to the next for payment. This was justified, particularly in the case of war debts, by the rationalization that since war is fought to maintain the independence and integrity of the nation, future generations should bear the burden of the cost.

   But this was not the view of the American Founding Fathers. They felt that the wars, economic problems, and debts of one generation should be paid for by the generation which incurred them. They wanted the rising generation to be genuinely free -- both politically and economically. It was their feeling that passing on their debts to the next generation would be forcing the children of the future to be born into a certain amount of bondage or involuntary servitude-something for which they had neither voted nor subscribed. It would be, in a very literal sense, "taxation without representation." Clearly, they said, it was a blatant violation of a fundamental republican principle.

   Thomas Jefferson was particularly emphatic on this point. Said he:

   "That we are bound to defray [the war's] expenses within our own time, and unauthorized to burden posterity with them, I suppose to have been proved in my former letter.... We shall all consider ourselves morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within the life [expectancy] of the majority.... We must raise, then, ourselves the money for this war, either by taxes within the year or by loans; and if by loans, we must repay them ourselves, proscribing forever the English practice of perpetual funding."
293

   From the founding of the nation under the new Constitution, it became a policy of supreme importance to pay off the national debt. In his first term, President Washington wrote:

   "I entertain a strong hope that the state of the national finances is now sufficiently matured to enable you to enter upon a systematic and effectual arrangement for the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt, according to the right which has been reserved to the government. No measure can be more desirable, whether viewed with an eye to its intrinsic importance, or to the general sentiment and wish of the nation."
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   The following year the President made it clear that this was no casual suggestion to Congress, but a matter of the highest priority:

   "No pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt; on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable."
295

   Just before leaving office, Washington made a final plea to the Congress to exert a greater effort to pay off the national debt, if only for the sake of the next generation. He said:

   "Posterity may have cause to regret if, from any motive, intervals of tranquillity are left unimproved for accelerating this valuable end."
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   When we trace the history of the national debt, we find that the policy laid down by the Founders has been followed by every generation until the present one. One of the charts accompanying this chapter reflects the annual national debt from the days of George Washington to the present. By carefully tracing the pattern of these debts, we notice that after every war or financial emergency involving heavy indebtedness there was an immediate effort to pay it off as rapidly as possible. This policy was followed for the sake of the rising generation. The adult citizens of America wanted their children born in freedom, not bondage.

   In our own day, however, a different attitude toward national fiscal policies has evolved. This is not only reflected in the skyrocketing thrust of an astonishing level of national indebtedness, but it has been accompanied by an equally profligate explosion in the cost of government operations, as reflected in the chart showing "Outlays of the Federal Government: 1789 to 2006."

   America's contribution to mankind's 5,000-year leap was achieved by rather strict adherence to certain fundamental principles which were part of the Founders' phenomenal success formula. As we have already seen, some of these most important fundamentals are being neglected if not repudiated in our own day. A most important area of neglect is the advice of the Founders concerning national fiscal policies. As we examine the outlays of the federal government and the U.S. national debt throughout the history of the nation, we find a number of notable things.

Outlays of the Federal Government: 1789 to 2006

2006 ....... 2,473,298,000,000

2005 ....... 2,399,843,000,000

2004 ....... 2,318,834,000,000

2003 ....... 2,157,637,000,000