When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
-Thomas Jefferson
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
-Thomas Jefferson
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
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
-Thomas Jefferson
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
-Thomas Jefferson
No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.
-Thomas Jefferson
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
-Thomas Jefferson
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
-Thomas Jefferson
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
-Thomas Jefferson
And last - but most interesting:
'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
-Thomas Jefferson
Bravo, except for that last. It may be true, but private banks under the excessive control of government are inevitably worse.
I don’t see banks as being any different than any other business. Businesses, corporations and individuals are all subject to the law, each watching the other to see that we don’t break the law. Government is the only one that can use force which is why:
The government must never control or benefit from the success/failure of a business or individual, except of course through revenue carefully limited from that success via government’s most abused loophole, taxation.
If the people become corrupt (apathetic, buying influence, selling votes, devaluing integrity in ourselves or our business/government leaders), the government will be come corrupt. Case in point, the US.
First Atlas shrugged, then Jimmy Carter shrugged, now we all have shrugged sighing one giant MEH!
Yes Mr. Jefferson certainly had an interesting perspective in those days. This quote here must be what Imp is getting at when he speaks of a future revolution:
The TJ quote I thought was not historically correct is the last in the list because of two words in it. As it turned out, I looked in Yahoo and it seems it is verifiable. It was one he made in !802. See if you can find which two words they are I suspected being them.
Wasn’t there one from Jefferson’s dottage about people not being born with saddles on their backs; nor are those who choose to ride them born with whips and spurs??? Some of the statements on forms in the Declaration of Independence are worth knowing… The guy had a philosopher’s grasp of forms, but his statement all men created equal is pure metaphysics, common in his age; common even today…
Faust, I guess I made the hint too easy. Smith died in 1790, so if those two words were coined by him, it would have to been then or before. It’s quite possible he didn’t though. Those terms may have arisen in a university or some parliamentary setting of government.
I think you are misunderstanding the point Jefferson is trying to make is not that the free market is bad, but that central banking is bad. He is talking about a privately owned central bank that issues all liquidity and makes money out of nothing. Nobody listened to him, and consequently that is precisely what we have today.
Also, the banks are different then other corporations because they are controlled by certain prominent families and have formed a cartel which is a partnership between them and the U.S. government with which they can extract money out of the public at will giving nothing in return. I even take it a step further and say banking is usury and should be illegal since the bankers provide no useful service whatsoever yet receive money. It is more or less a scam. But I leave that as an opinion. If we could just get rid of the cartel I would be happy enough.
I agree with this, both your view of it, and what has happened in fact…There is nothing in our constitution linking the government with the economy… It is because of the social ties and the shared ideology as well as the monatary influence over government which is not anticipated by the constitution or protected against… Rather, property has protection, because property paid the taxes… When we got the income tax in this country it affected a fraction of the population, perhaps 11 to 13 percent… That burden of support of the country has been loaded onto the back of working people primarily… The effect has been to raise the price of property which could be a bank of wealth, and to lower the price of labor… Since the price of labor is so depressed it will not support the government, and can no longer afford property, and the price of money necessary to buy property is too high, then the price of property will fall… The price of property should always have been kept low by high taxes… When people started paying taxes with their labor the influence of property and money, The Senate should have been ended… Even the house has been made a buyers market to better serve property… The form and the function have at once been destroyed for that body… It began with each member representing 30 thousand, and now each member represents of 600 thousands… Consider that the Greek Supreme Court had a ratio of 1 to 250 to raise the price of bribery… We lower the price of bribery… And it is extra constitutional… These are changes the government has made without seeking the consent of the people…
'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
-Thomas Jefferson
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Jefferson is a contradictory man. You do realize that he said this last part because he was a Virginia landowner, right? Most of the Virginian ‘aristocracy’ was in debt to banks at the time. I believe it was made in the context of arguing against Hamilton’s bank law…
Jefferson is a contradictory man. You do realize that he said this last part because he was a Virginia landowner, right? Most of the Virginian ‘aristocracy’ was in debt to banks at the time. I believe it was made in the context of arguing against Hamilton’s bank law…
[/quote]
The ability of the government to run up a deficit instead of taxing has set us on the road to ruin… Jackson fixed the deficit by seizing a bunch of Native American lands and selling it off from under them in spite of a treaty… Well mineral rights and airwaves and public property of all sorts has been turned over to the rich instead of the government taxing them…Jefferson was right, that the ability of the government to run into debt encouraged adventurism with the cost loaded onto the backs of working people…Do you think if land and wealth were taxed that the rich would have allowed their government to be taken into dead end wars like Afghanistan, or Vietnam??? As long as those Bastards know the price can be handed to the working people there is no limit to the stupid stuff they will do… We forget that property once supported the government… For that reason prperty was given the protection of rights, and the bulk of the government…When the income tax became constitutional it affected a small fraction, around ten percent of the population; but now they cry that it does not affect all the working people…How can it, when wages are driven down, and how could the government allow such low wages if capital did not own the government???
What if everyone in the country, as a protest to high taxation, decided to not pay their taxes for 1 year? What would happen? How long would it take the IRS to process the delinquencies of every eligible taxpayer? What is all eligible taxpayers decided to stop paying taxes indefinitely until they received a fair rate?
They all throw tantrums… And it would be impossible to withhold taxes from the government when paying them forward is the price of employment…The way to kill the government is to disbelieve, and distrust in them and in everything they say…Trust is the glue of any relationship…Lose that and the show is over…And we are almost there… Government long ago quit pursuing the goals for which it was constituted, and has begun to work against the interest of the people…Feeding the banks which can no longer feed on the people, when not feeding them might have freed us all from that monster shows what side they are on… When businesses do not have a product the people can or will buy, and the government buys it with their money instead and send the bill to the people it is a sign, and one few are missing that capitalism does not work…
no, it isn’t capitalism that isn’t working… the banks should have failed because they were forced to make bad loans by the government… it is the government’s fault… but oh no, the new god called government can’t be wrong…
Oh right…I would like you to draw a fine line between business and government… The trend has always been for less democracy, and more influence of business… The government justly had more influence and rights from property when property paid the taxes… When that burden was loaded onto labor, labor got no more rights, and in fact, when the income tax was made constitutional it affected a fraction of the people, perhaps 11% of the people; and it was designed to make taxes more fair since wealth had become less of property and more or money income… But that loading of taxes onto the working classes was not fair and was accomplished while the only democratic arm of government was made less democratic… The house began representing at a ration of one to 30K… Now the ratio is one to 600K… Considering that district are drawn to be divided, and we are divided because government has led us into divisiion, and because we are ruled by extra constitutional parties that only add resistence to the process of government…If a district is divided it is a good sign that it needs two and not just one representative…I don’t care if you think you are a liberal or a conservative, but government does not get better for anyone when half the population is denied representation… And it should be numerous to raise their price, but in making themselves a sellers market to raise their price they have lowered their value to the people… Consider that the Greek Supreme Court had a ratio of one to every 250 free male citizens for the very purpose of making their price to great to afford… The government was designed to resist popular democracy…The parties, which are not constitutional add to that resistence, but the effect is that government must all the more fear any shift in public opinion… And it was for this reason that Mr. Greenspan pushed for wide spread home ownership… Even while he could see that wealth, because of unfair taxation and loss of rights for working people was migrating en masse to the rich, that for people to own their own homes provided support for private property rights… It was all for show, to manage public opinion even while all public wealth became more and more privitized in the hands of the rich…
So no…Capitalism does not work. Every few years the government has to prop up the economy at the expense of the people…How much they think they can do that when only 20% of us hold productive jobs, and we are now all living on credit to get by is a mystery… The thing does not work…It could have been an infinite game… But they have eaten the country, and eaten the world… Now they must come face to face with the fact that all people still need to be supported by their countries whether they own them or not…People can only buy back a part of their produce, and even if capital goes global, that fact holds true…So when the people support the government with wages, and that makes them all the poorer even sooner, then the government, if it would survive must tax wealth and property…Let us see if that happens…
That one pretty much ends taxation. I mean the latest Gulf War is ideas in action.
Prescient. I find it amazing that taxpayers have to pay a private organization to make and print paper money and that this is an interest bearing process. Beyond that the banks have hallucinatory powers - with a thousand in their vault they can loan ten times that and charge interest on all of it. I mean that is a joke. I can’t do that. They can create money and then charge interest on it. And we cannot even take away their property if they mess up. No collateral. No personal responsibility.
Smith died in 1790, so if those two words were coined by him, it would have to been then or before. It’s quite possible he didn’t though. Those terms may have arisen in a university or some parliamentary setting of government.