Thomas Jefferson. (1743-1826)

‘We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat, in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creed, our people, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give 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. ‘We have not time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our landholders, too, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must.be contented with penury, obscurity and exile, private fortunes are destroyed by public, as well as by private extravagance. ‘This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left, but for sinning and suffering. And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train, wretchedness and oppression.’ Thomas Jefferson. (1743-1826).