Thomas Jefferson

Discussion in 'Politics' started by wilburbear, Dec 29, 2011.

  1. How did he know our current situation from his letter of July 12, 1816?



    "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."
     
  2. pspr

    pspr

    The nature of government. That's why it must be restrained by the governed.
     
  3. He wrote some of the prettiest bullshit you will ever read. All men are created equal, except for his slaves who were auctioned off after his death. Then he initially calls people subjects in the Constitution. These founding fathers were bullshit artists going through the motions of the regime change that transpired with language designed to promote some ideal order.