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Politics • Essays

Debt and Indentured Servitiude

04-07-2009

Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Our country is at a crossroads. You have a chance to decide what to do about it.

We are about to plunge 1.7 trillion dollars into debt for 2009 alone (1), and the president's budget would double publicly held debt in five years and nearly triple it in ten years. Within that time, interest on the national debt will become the largest line item in the federal budget. This means that your children will see their paychecks plundered tomorrow but get NOTHING in return, because they are paying for the party that the government of a previous generation threw for itself.

Obama’s debt will be used to build a power structure that takes more choices out of your hands and puts them into the hands of government bureaucrats. In his socialist paradise, your life will be one big day at the DMV, one big HMO plan, one endless chain of wrangling with petty people who get to decide whether you're sufficiently injured to see a doctor, whether you're sufficiently competent to manage your own retirement, and whether it’s sufficiently eco-friendly to let you fire up a charcoal grill in your own backyard. In short, more areas of your life will be governed by people who have less in touch with making a living than you do, less common sense than you do, and less interest in prudent spending than you do.

That debt will also be used to dole out more and more favors from a smaller and smaller taxpayer base. If more people are told they don’t have to pay taxes because they’re poor (that is, they’re “victims” and entitled to the fruits of someone else’s labor), and the rich own the Congressmen who write the loopholes, that leaves the middle class holding the bag for the gifts that government provides. This will result in majority tyranny over a minority that has no legal recourse, no means of redress. There will be nothing in the Constitution, no entry in the Bill of Rights to defend the taxpayers from the expanding crowd of people made to believe they are absolutely dependent on the government for their very existence.

In short, our country is jumping into the deep end of socialism. Socialism is great in theory but always ends in starvation and violence instead of prosperity. This is because human nature, at its heart, is greedy and petty. Human nature is petty under capitalism, but at least if you hate company A you can buy from company B. Under government monopoly socialism, however, where can you go when the institution becomes corrupt (and it always will become corrupt)? You have no recourse. You are a slave.

Though neither capitalism nor socialism is ideal, sometimes you have to choose between the lesser of two evils. In capitalism, the customer still has power to command respect because he or she can choose, can compel changes by taking their business elsewhere and thereby changing the dynamic of the marketplace. In socialism this recourse is not available, the social engineers know all too well that the populace is powerless, and the inevitable ascendancy of tyranny follows.

Also, the combination of capitalism plus liberty lets people make their own choices and learn from their own mistakes. While this may sound cruel, it is superior to letting a ruling class makes its own choices while compelling everyone else to pay for their mistakes.

And finally, this debt deployed within the framework of socialism will destroy our civil liberties as we are compelled to work and live within narrow government constraints. Our principal debt holder, our “landlord,” will be the Chinese. Your children will live at the behest of a debt-holding nation that neither signed off on nor recognizes the inalienable human writes enumerate in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If our country does not reverse its reckless spending, future generations of Americans will live as indentured servants to one of the most repressive and tyrannical nations on earth, the benevolent uncle of North Korea, the regime started by Mao Tse Tung.

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