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The American Crisis: That My Child May Have Peace

Have you ever wondered how the United States amassed so much debt? It’s simple: as the world’s reserve currency, few ever questioned the solvency of its issuer, so creditors domestically and abroad have long ponied up the cash on the promise of future repayment in the form of goods rendered at some future date. 

While the United States government has had little issue with satisfying the paper obligations through the proverbial printing press, they haven’t figured out anything new in order to satisfy that latter obligation: the production of the actual goods needed to legitimately repay those debts. 

This repayment will ultimately take the form of taxes on men and women, boys and girls not yet even born, at some time in the not-so-distant future. 

Through the processes of government, which is always clever enough to reclassify the terms, these debts will essentially enslave the public into years of labor to afford the taxes to repay the debt accrued by the profligate and tyrannical government their ancestors had previously tolerated or, in other cases, even endorsed. 

Ladies and gentlemen, your sons and daughters, your grandsons and granddaughters, and others yet unborn will inherit this country and the problems you leave to them because you were too timid, too afraid, too indifferent, or too foolish to confront them. 

As Fyodor Dostoevsky, the famed philosopher and critic of Tsarist Russia, wrote in Crime and Punishment in 1866:

"Man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice."

Chances are, cowardice in the present will lead to hopeless ignorance in the future. Future generations are likely to know even less about the history and principles of the founding of the American republic, let alone the time-tested traditions of that bygone era, and they’ll simply assume that your silence or failure to act to preserve them implied acceptance or consent. 

Those future generations, riddled with debt and the incapacity to protect themselves or even raise a family, will be at the mercy of those who govern over them with the uncontested canon of taxation, some new deal, a distorted history and the benefit of your acquiescence. 



Will you leave your children and your grandchildren in this weakened condition to fight the battle you yourself could have waged on their behalf? Will you await some formal invitation or will you take up the mantle and assume your role as the true leader of your family and the proud owner of its legacy? 

There will be no formal invitation to this undertaking, and every family has for their protection only the men who presently lead them. Future generations will invariably look back upon these great men — their fathers and grandfathers — who once led them. 

Will these men be cowards when their families, and their country, call on them to defend them and their posterity? For the sake of freedom, and for the sake of posterity, I surely hope not. 

As revolutionary Thomas Paine proclaimed in his 1775 pamphlet The American Crisis, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.”

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