As the surfacy Mamdani-inspired rhetoric of “affordability” infects the public discourse, an ex-slave’s clear-eyed contempt for economic slavery gets more to the root of the so-called crisis than decades of pablum from bookish economists, politicians, and “experts.”
Fountain Hughes – grandson of Wormly Hughes, one of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves – said he had a Christian master who treated him “civilly.”
Even so, Hughes cherished freedom so much that he preferred death to slavery.
“If I thought … that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away,” Hughes said. “Because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog.”
Hughes died in 1957, two years after Rosa Parks’ arrest sparked the MLK-led Montgomery bus boycott. He lived long enough to be one of 23 ex-slaves tape-recorded for the Library of Congress between 1932 and 1975.
“Uncle Fountain,” as he was called, was interviewed by engineer Hermond Norwood in Charlottesville, Virginia on June 11, 1949. Hughes told Norwood he was 101 and, strangely, he didn’t begin the interview with the horrors of bondage. The first few minutes were spent warning against a different kind of slavery: debt.
For Hughes, affordability was simple – don’t buy things you can’t afford.
“… don’t want everything somebody else’s got,” he said. “Whatever you get … be satisfied with it and don’t spend your money until you get it.”
Since borrowers are, in effect, slaves to lenders, Hughes’s contempt for debt is not surprising. Anytime he wanted something, he either paid cash or did without.
“That’s what I’ve done,” said Hughes. “I never bought nothing on time in my life. … I don’t owe nobody five cents… But I’m just as happy as somebody that got millions. … I’ll pay for it, and I’m done with it.”
Regardless of your bank account or the economy, buying only what you can afford is the behavior, ultimately, that drives affordability – for individuals and government.
Getting help to pay for things, either through credit or government help, has the actual effect of increasing demand for things that would’ve remained unchanged otherwise. Higher demand, higher prices, blah, blah, blah … we get it.
But worse, when government “helps” individuals or corporations with subsidies as a matter of policy, as economist Thomas Sowell has said, it separates those being helped from the consequences of their poor choices, which leads, not to self-sufficiency, but to dependency – a sneaky kind of slavery.
We not only saw this during the financial crisis when companies were considered “too big to fail,” but we saw it weeks ago when SNAP recipients threatened to burglarize stores if their benefits stopped. One SNAP recipient, after receiving her benefits, videoed her fridge and cabinets packed with food. You couldn’t help but notice that she was recording on an expensive cell phone that also showed her fresh manicure and tattoos. Tattoos and manicures over food? Bad decision.
“… you cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible,” Sowell said.
Consumer debt was $16 billion in 1949, the year Hughes was interviewed. Today it’s a record $18.5 trillion, which includes $1.2 trillion in credit card debt, according to the New York Federal Reserve.
The national debt in Hughes’s day was $290 billion. Today, it’s $38 trillion, 121 percent of debt-to-GDP. The federal government takes in $5 trillion in taxes but spends $7 trillion, leaving a deficit of nearly $2 trillion … and growing!
And what are the top two budget items? Medicare ($1.7 trillion) and Social Security ($1.5 trillion), more than half of the nation’s income. It’s impossible to cut spending without touching these holy grails, but DOGE got their heads snapped off when they simply tried to cut fraud.
Why? Dependency.
Even Mamdani’s idol, FDR, who in the emergency of depression redefined the government’s role to help unemployed and starving Americans as an “obligation,” also warned against incentivizing dependency.
“The lessons of history, … show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to nation’s fiber,” said FDR. “To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”
That horse left the barn long ago.
Dependency and the “spiritual and moral disintegration” that comes with it, are our biggest challenges in tackling the so-called “affordability crisis.”
Entrenched big government programs (New Deal, War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, Build Back Better, DEI, etc.) have, over the decades, institutionalized dependency.
Which leads to something else Hughes said.
Ex-slaves should be “awful thankful” that they’re free, he said, “And some of them is sorry they are free now. Some of them now would rather be slaves.”
Why? Because having had their livelihoods handed to them from birth, some never wanted to muster the hardships required to be self-sufficient in freedom.
And it’s not just ex-slaves. An innate human tendency drives die-hard clingers to free stuff, according to the late economist Frederic Bastiat.
Man satisfies his wants in two basic ways: by his own ceaseless labor, or by seizing and consuming the labor of others. These are the roots of capitalism and socialism.
“… since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain – and since labor is pain in itself – it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work,” Bastiat wrote.
And when does plunder end? When it becomes “more painful and dangerous” than work.
Using the government as an instrument of plunder to “seize” the work of others (“tax the rich,” unending welfare, etc.) is what Bastiat called “the poor man’s plunder.”
America’s pool of “poor plunderers” is where diabolical politicians swim to get and keep power, along with guilt-ridden whites who cheer for them.
More than “affordability,” the peculiar institution of dependency is our real crisis. Fixing affordability without addressing slavish dependency is like endlessly inventing ways to get the water out of a sinking boat, while ignoring the hole.