With all of the out of control and unsustainable spending by the government, coupled with the liberty-snatching proposed and recent legislation coming from Washington D.C., I felt it was time to recycle two quotes from past historical figures (that I’ve used in previous essays) that are still perfectly germane to our present situation.

They are, more than anything, words of warning to each of us that there are consequences that we must bear if we don’t buckle down and reduce our profligate spending and we don’t (via our vote) restore fiscal and constitutional sanity to our government with the folks we elect to represent us.

The first quote is an excerpt from a letter to an American friend by Thomas B. Macaulay, a 19th century English writer and historian, dated May 23, 1857:

A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can only last until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority will always cast their ballots for the candidates promising [the] most benefits from the public purse with the result that a democracy always collapses from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship.

and the second was written by Professor Alexander Tyler (University of Edinborough, Scotland) when our democracy was still young in 1787:

The average age of the world’s greatest democratic nations and societies has been 200 years. Each has gone through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back again into bondage.

These two individuals lived in an era of simplicity and sacrifice. They could only imagine the largess and wealth that we enjoy as modern American citizens. Yet they knew human nature. They knew that free men and women cannot be trusted to be thrifty and prudent. But little could they imagine just how greedy and imprudent that a free nation, like ours, could become given enough time.

Our gluttony regarding the largess of the public treasury has gotten away from us — we’ve spent too much time at the ‘all you can eat’ buffet. Most of us have paid a modest price for the continued ‘benefits’ that we reap from the government. Like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, SSDI, WIC and the myriad other alphabet soup entitlements that have become a co-dependent lifeline for far too many Americans. We don’t sit back and realize that we literally get something for nothing: That we get a return far beyond our investment.

This to me isn’t being a good citizen or being a patriot. No, this greed is far from it! It is selfish and it is destructive to our nation’s future. Our want for goodies will make our children’s future unbearable and filled with sacrifice. In our single-minded greed we are using the future, our children, as pain proxies for our unconscionable actions.

It’s not the way I want my generation to be remembered in history books in the future. It’s not the legacy that I want to pass on to our nation’s heirs.

But that’s the way it’s going to be. And damn us all for letting this happen. We are squandering the legacy of the finest nation in the history of the universe to satisfy selfish, greedy personal and political motivations. I can only hope that our fall from plenty and our plight thereafter will be kind to us. I suspect otherwise, as we have been unrelenting and single-minded in our journey into this situation.

We need to suffer in our time of bondage (as Tyler so presciently predicted) to remind us that we, by the Founder’s intentions, are first-and-foremost a nation of modesty and thrift rather than the gluttonous nation of gimme guys and gals that we unfortunately have become. I get the impression that we are, collectively, slow learners who are quick to complain and who are quick to demand relief from others more industrious, thrifty or luckier than ourselves (i.e. “the rich”.)

If we stop our national spending orgy NOW and reduce our government outlays to a more reasonable level, then maybe we still have a chance to pay down the inter-galactic-sized debt we owe as a nation. But that will mean true sacrifice for many if not most of us, and changes to our lifestyles that will be — in one word — painful. No matter, changes must take place…and they must take place sooner than later. We’ll see if we are patriots and good citizens, or we’ll see if self-interests and greed are the continued watchwords of our lives.

Only time will tell…