Debt is in itself not immoral if the person encumbers himself for a good purpose – expanding a business, building a home or sending a child to college. It becomes an immoral act when debt is incurred without the consent of the individual. Debt is taxation of the individual without representation.

 

 

This effort will become political theatre of the first order with the media. Both sides will be touting the good and the bad of raising the debt ceiling. I predict that the debt ceiling will be raised, which is the consummate example of doing evil in the name of good. Progressives will argue that the poor will be harmed if the debt ceiling is not raised. Their plea is that only government can sustain the poor for the poor will never be capable of sustaining themselves. 

 

 

It is false because it is government that defines poor, not the poor defining themselves. There have been since time immemorial those who have more and those who have less. However, it has been only been recently that those with less have been defined as the class of poor. Charles Murray in his book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” notes, “Michael Harrington’s The Other America created a stir when it was published in 1962 partly because Harrington said America’s poor constituted a class separate from the working class – a daring proposition. At the time, the poor were not seen as a class, either by other Americans or in their own eyes. The poor were working-class people who didn’t make much money.”

 

The public debate is jobs. Jobs mean a working class. The working class consists of all those working or earning a living or having a job not supported by government. The working class has shrunk under both Democrat and Republican administrations. There is a growing concern that today more people vote for a living than work for a living. The public sector creates prosperity, which in turn creates jobs, which in turn allows the working class to advance and be less poor.

 

Government, on the other hand, consumes wealth and uses it to its own ends. Our republican form of government was created to protect property. Property was defined in broad terms by James Madison, author of the Constitution. Madison wrote, “[Property] embraces everything to which a man may attach a value and have a right: and which leaves to everyone else the like advantage. In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has property in his opinions, and the free communication of them.”

 

 

Take away a man’s property and he is no longer a man but a slave. Government at every level has created reasons to limit mankind in both its property and his rights. For decades the federal, state and local governments have been instituting laws and regulations designed to smother property rights. Government at every level is becoming what Thomas Jefferson called the “feudal-ruler form of government”. In the feudal-ruler scheme according to Brian Sussman, author of Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America”, “The rights of the government become superior to the rights of citizens.”

 

Only when men and women come together and take back their property will they truly be free. We must be superior to our government or tyranny will reign supreme.