Democracy and Debt

In honor of Election Day, and of my late brother, Jerrold Lee Smith, I offer here one of his essays, which he posted to his blog, The Chair-Herding Pictures, more than 12 years ago. It's a theme he came back to more than once in the eight years before his untimely death in 2014.

Recall that in the spring of 2006, the country was churning through what was to become its longest-ever, most-expensive-ever war (the one in Afghanistan, which still ain't over, folks), and had three years earlier launched a pre-meditated and unprovoked assault on Iraq that effectively destroyed that country and expanded our national debt dramatically. People around the globe were shouting from the rooftops at the time that, not only were the justifications for the attack bogus, but that the resulting chaos would engulf the whole region and devastate our own economy here in the US.

And that is, of course, precisely what has happened. BUT that war had all kinds of knock-on effects so enticing to the 1% and their lackeys that they just couldn't resist.

Today, it's not a war against a bogus enemy abroad, but a war right here at home against the poorest and most vulnerable, in the form of such wars most endearing to the GOP: tax cuts.

But as they say, the more things change... 

Democracy and Debt

Jerrold Smith 4/3/2006  http://thechair-herdingpictures.blogspot.com/

“Starve the beast.” That’s the expression created by hyper-right-winger Grover Norquist for the strategy to eliminate federal programs opposed by the far right. “I don’t want to abolish government,” he told Mara Liasson on National Public Radio. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”1

The right talks about smaller government as if that is automatically a good thing. Is it? If a tsunami devastates the east coast in 2008, do we want the federal government to sit on its hands because small government is best? I certainly hope a bird flu pandemic never materializes. But if it does, do we want the National Centers for Disease Control to watch from the sidelines because they don’t have enough money? Suppose taxes are cut repeatedly in the course of an indefinite war. Might the citizens eventually be compelled to choose between Social Security and national security?

Governments, according to the Declaration of Independence, derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Thomas Jefferson, the author of that quaint formulation, also believed that the national debt undermines sovereignty because debt limits options. Debt forces upon future generations obligations to which they did not and could not consent. That is precisely why the anti-American right is driving the country deeper and deeper into debt. They want to “starve the beast” by establishing national peonage.

1  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1123439