In any form, debt is a form of repression. Debt is bondage, plain and simple. In fact, the U.S. Department of State got it right when it reported that debt bondage has one primary goal: "to keep a person in subjugation." For more than 200 years, we, the people, have proved as a nation that we know how to dig ourselves quite successfully into a bottomless financial hole and perpetuate our subjugation to debt.
Our Founders created this country to experience freedom from tyranny and domination. Do we think we can experience liberty politically and personally when our private and national debts loom over us like the king of England once did?
Though the Revolutionary War took its toll upon the financial status of the nation (as wars always do), most ardent patriots didn't want to see the country accrue any further arrears. Shedding representative light on that fiscal responsibility was Thomas Jefferson, who had quite a bit of financial advice to offer the new nation. Here are a few of his pearls of wisdom:
-- "The maxim of buying nothing but what we had money in our pockets to pay for; a maxim which, of all others, lays the broadest foundation for happiness." -- Thomas Jefferson to Fulwar Skipwith, 1787.
-- "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." -- Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816.
-- "It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world." -- Thomas Jefferson to A.L.C. Destutt de Tracy, 1820.
So did Jefferson accept his own advice? Yes and no.
Jefferson and his contemporaries did in fact apply some wise fiscal principles to the running of the national government. For the record, Jefferson's administration (1801-1809) reduced the national deficit from roughly $83 million to $57 million, despite America's war with the Barbary States during the same period.
Sad to say, however, that Jefferson's own personal life ended up in quite the financial shambles; he owed more than $100,000 when he died.
In the end, I guess he really was American after all.