“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”—Thomas Jefferson
Another brilliant quote from Jefferson. First of all, to be “free,” a people need to know what “freedom” is and, more importantly, where it comes from. Licentiousness is not freedom, yet that is what the Left, in the guise of the Democratic Party, is trying to teach American today. As Edmund Burke so wisely pointed out, “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” People aren’t “free” if they can’t control their own passions and lusts; they are enslaved by them, and will eventually be destroyed by such.
Freedom comes from God, Who is the source of all things. “All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” That is from the American Declaration of Independence, of course, written by Thomas Jefferson. Notice that the “Creator” “endowed” us with certain rights, and one of those is “Liberty.” Freedom’s source is God. He defines it, tells us how to obtain it, the restrictions thereon, and how to maintain it. It’s why He is the greatest enemy of the totalitarian Left. The less we know about this freedom (“ignorance” in the Jeffersonian quote above), the less chance we have of obtaining freedom, or being “in a state of civilization.” Barbarians—those who live selfish, uncivilized, unvirtuous, ungodly lives, cause others to live in fear. Those who live in fear do not live in freedom.
Thus, Jefferson is 100% accurate. No society ignorant of the true Source and nature of freedom, has been, or ever will be, truly free. It is absolutely no surprise, to the wise, that the farther America, and the world, has moved away from the principles Jefferson enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, the more barbaric, and less free, people have become. They don’t know God. Thus, they won’t know, or have, true freedom.
Elon Musk recently said, “If you get a trillion dollars of economic growth, and you cut the budget deficit by a trillion - between now and next year - there is no inflation… And if the government is not borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline. So, everyone’s mortgage, their car payment, their credit card bills, their student debt, the monthly payments drop. That’s a fantastic scenario!”
Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are/have been businessmen and thus know how to operate within a budget, and indeed, that any business or organization must do so. Politicians rarely worry about it because they are spending other people’s money and have an endless supply. Government can either borrow what it wants or print money. Both of those scenarios are, except in emergencies and for only very short periods of time, very harmful and inflationary to an economy. Witness the Biden years.
What Musk is proposing in the quote above is common-sense economics for government, something every government should have, but rarely does. Frankly, Trump didn’t do it very well his first term, but he seems serious about it now. But cutting government spending is the last thing the Democrats and the Deep State want. Government spending buys votes—the highest priority to any politician, especially to Democrats. Also, Democrats, being Marxist Leftists, believe that government is the solution to all of mankind’s ills, especially if run by them. Economizing government is utterly anathema to those people. Thus, they are screaming, hollering, crying, cursing, lying, and doing everything they can to hinder what Trump and Musk are trying to do.
But, from what I gather, the American people—by and large—are in favor of this much-needed government diet. Most people have enough sense to realize that every entity must have a least a measure of frugality and cannot wastefully spend money it doesn’t have. To be $36 trillion in debt is obscene. Only the ignorant don’t know that. They are the ones who will be enslaved to government.
And they will continue to vote Democrat. They want their free lunch. Seventy-five million of them voted for the most incompetent, freedom-denying, yea, frightening Presidential candidate in our nation’s history. Yes, ignorance and freedom are, as Mr. Jefferson said, directly related.
But the rest of us don’t want to pay for it any more.
The Left, i.e., the Democratic Party and the Deep State, have a vested interest in keeping the American people ignorant of the above common sense economic principles. They have controlled the Department of Education for generations now, and thus countless millions are completely ignorant of the basics of economics, and other principles of limited government, virtuous republicanism, and the true source and proper restrictions upon freedom. Mr. Trump’s biggest battle with the Left will probably be over the Department of Education. He has called for the DOE to be “closed immediately.” The Left will fight that to its dying breath. Ignorance is the only thing that keeps them going.
An ignorant people—either willfully or unwillingly ignorant—will eventually be enslaved by a totalitarian government, by demagogues who will buy their votes with their own money to their own destruction. No nation can be, ever has been, or ever will be ignorant and free. Jefferson had it exactly right. And that applies to America as well. It is one of the major, most important battles that we face today, and we’d better win it or future generations will only know government tyranny. That so many want that, and vote for such tyranny, shows how far into ignorance and decadence America has already fallen.
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