The title is from Proverbs 22:3
This is Part 3 in a 3-part series:
Part 1: Whom Shall Ye Serve
Part 2: You Shall Know Them By Their Fruits
I thought for a long time that many of our “leaders” must be stupid, ignorant perhaps, or simple? They’ve made so many obvious “mistakes.” But it can’t be so. They aren’t “mistakes.” Some have warned of the dangers; Eisenhower comes immediately to mind. He predicted both the military-industrial complex, and the technocracy, two generations back, circa 1961. And, with eyes closed, we walked into both traps. Ike wasn’t the first. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, about what despotism might look like having taken hold:
…an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives…Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
So, so powerful, and if that doesn’t start some alarm bells ringing I don’t know what will. Tocqueville saw this coming, in 1835. And we passed on. Yet, Tocqueville was not the first. I will quote perhaps my favorite Founding Father:
Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it never may be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, Government shall itself consume the whole residue of what it was instituted to guard.
Thomas Jefferson's First State of the Union Address (8 December 1801)
While Jefferson was perhaps also not the first to warn us, it is as he said. In the end government will consume all, if We allow it. The 38% of all currently taken by local, state and federal governments combined, the 30% taken by the federal government alone, is not the end.
And for the most part, we pass on, not seeing, not hearing, and if we do by chance see or hear, not believing. “It can’t happen here.” Well my friends, as predicted by so many, it is happening here.
Now, in answer to the last question from You Shall Know Them By Their Fruits…
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