The National Debt of the United States from the creation of the country in 1783 until 1986 was $2 trillion. The National Debt of the United States has increased by $2 trillion in the last 18 months from $9 trillion to $11 trillion. It has increased by $1 trillion in the last six months. The independent Congressional Budget Office, which has been overly optimistic over time, projects that the Obama budget plan will add $9.3 trillion to the National Debt by 2019. This will drive the National Debt as a percentage of GDP to levels above the peak years reached during World War II. The difference is that in 2019 the unfunded liabilities totaling $56 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will sweep over the country like a tsunami. If our government follows the path it has chosen, our country will be bankrupted.
Many Americans who have lived by the rules are angry, frustrated, and appalled at what the government is doing. They feel helpless to change the course of the country. The housing, spending, and debt bubbles will burst completely, no matter what the government does. Following the current path will lead us into the Japanese model of a 25 year downturn, if we’re lucky. When I read many of the responses to my last article about ways to reclaim your life, I was struck that We The People actually hold all the cards. The government is at our mercy. Americans can change the course of the country through passive resistance. American consumer spending makes up 70% of the U.S. economy. No matter how much liquidity the Federal Reserve creates out of thin air, we do not have to spend the money. American citizens pay $1.2 trillion in Federal Income taxes per year. If they decided not to pay these taxes, the empire would come to a grinding halt. American citizens have more control then they know.
I came across an essay by Henry David Thoreau called "Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government)", published in 1849. It argues that people should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. The definition of civil disobedience is the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government, without resorting to physical violence.
“Resistance” also served as part of Thoreau’s metaphor which compared the government to a machine, and said that when the machine was working injustice it was the duty of conscientious citizens to be “a counter friction” – that is, a resistance – “to stop the machine.”
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.Henry David ThoreauThoreau’s most famous quote from the essay was:That government is best which governs least.
Mr. Thoreau was a man of principle. He believed that citizens should follow their moral conscience above the laws of the state. He believed that slavery was immoral and that the invasion of Mexico to acquire land was not right. He refused to pay his taxes in protest and was jailed for this action. Thoreau’s argument was as follows:
How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.
Thoreau’s essay was the inspiration for both Mohandas Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement. Both men admired him for his bravery and morality.
Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practice in himself. He was one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced. He went to jail for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.
--Mohandas GandhiI became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.
--Martin Luther King
Americans have a duty to not sit idly by and enable the government to be an agent of injustice. The reckless actions taken by politicians and the Federal Reserve in the last eighteen months and their inaction regarding our $56 trillion of unfunded future liabilities are immoral, cowardly, and evil. David Galland, from Casey Research, reflects my anger in his recent column:
The bailout of corrupt bankers by corrupt politicians with money printed and borrowed from future generations is a criminal act and must be overturned by civil disobedience on the part of Americans with a moral conscience. The government has stepped over the line and we must act before it is too late. The brilliant John Hussman describes what Geithner, Bernanke and Congress have done in the last two weeks:But it is our generation that should take the hit. It is us who should feel the pain of the collapse. We did it to ourselves by standing idly by while the government and its many friends in the banking sector got us into this mess. And don’t forget the orgy of spending and personal debt that the population engaged in, encouraged every step of the way by the government’s easy-money policies. This all happened on our watch, but instead of taking our medicine, we the people are now encouraging the government in its many efforts to re-inflate the bubble, fully aware all we are really doing is trying to shift the mess onto the backs of our children, and their children, and probably their children’s children. What a bunch of cowards we are.
Ultimately, funding the bailout of lousy assets comes at the cost of debasing our currency and selling our good assets to foreigners. Make no mistake - we are selling off our future and the future of our children to prevent the bondholders of U.S. financial corporations from taking losses. We are using public funds to protect the bondholders of some of the most mismanaged companies in the history of capitalism, instead of allowing them to take losses that should have been their own. All our policy makers have done to date has been to squander public funds to protect the full interests of corporate bondholders.
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