From the 5000 year leap by W. Cleon Skousen
27th Principle- The Burden of Debt is a Destructive to Freedom as Subjugation by Conquest.
Slavery or involuntary servitude is the result of either subjugation by conquest or succumbing to the bondage of debt.
Debt, of course. is simply borrowing against the future. It exchanges a present advantage for a future obligation. It will require not only the return of the original advance of funds, but a substantial compensation to the creditor for the use of the money.
How Debt Can Benumb the Human Spirit
The Founders knew that borrowing can be an honorable procedure in a time of crisis, but they deplored it just the same. They looked upon it as a temporary handicap which should be alleviated at the earliest possible moment. They had undergone sufficient experience with debt to see its corrosive and debilitating effect, which tends to corrupt both individuals and nations.
In the case of the individual, excessive debt greatly curtails the freedom of the debtor. It benumbs his spirit. He often feels hesitant to seek a new location or change a profession. He passes up financial opportunities which a free man might risk. Heavy debt introduces an element of taint into a man's search for happiness. There seems to be a perpetual burden every waking hour. There is a sense of being perpetually threatened as he rides the razor's edge of potential disaster.
There is also the sense of waste-much like the man who has to make payments on a dead horse. It is money spent for pleasures or even needs that are long since past. It often means sleepless nights, recoiling under the burden of a grinding weight which is constantly increasing with every tick of the clock, and often at usurious rates.
The Founders' Attitude Toward Debt
The Founding Fathers belonged to an age when debt was recognized for the ugly spectre that it really is. They considered frugality a virtue, and even when an emergency compelled them to borrow, they believed in borrowing frugally and paying back promptly. Nearly everyone finds it to his advantage or absolute necessity to borrow on occasion. Debt becomes the only available means-a necessary evil. Nevertheless, the Founders wanted the nature of debt to be recognized for what it is: evil, because it is a form of bondage.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote:
The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it would make our country one of the happiest on earth.Experience during the war probed this; and I think every man will remember that, under all the privations it obliged him to submit to during that period, he slept sounder and awoke happier than he can do now. (Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 4:414)
Debts from Splurge Spending
The founders felt that the worst kind of debt is that which results from "splurge" borrowing-going into debt to enjoy the temporary luxury of extravegantly living "beyond one's means." They knew the seductive snare which this possibility presents to the person who is watching other people do it. The English author William Makepeace Thackeray reflected those feelings when he wrote these words in Vanity Fair: "How well those live who are comfortably and throroughtly in debt: how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds." (Vanity Fair, 2 vols. in 1 [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1893], 1:208)
But, of course, all the reveling and apparitions of debt financed prosperity disappear like a morning mist when it comes time to pay. Extravagant living, waste, and hazardous bankruptcy, abject poverty, and even gnawing hunger from lack of the most basic necessities of life. Universal human experience verifies the bitter reality of the parable of the prodigal son, who "would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat"(Luke 15:16).
The kind of frugality for which the Founders were famous was rooted in the conviction that debt should be abhorred like a plague. They perceived excessive indebtedness as a form of cultural disease.
End of part one
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