"One of the great tragedies of the war [World War II] now starting is that every people now engaged in it have been led into it without their fully knowing just where they are bound. The people themselves are largely innocent of this slaughter.... As the great neutral of the earth, America may play a far greater part in this war.... It is our solemn duty to play a better part than we can do by participating in the butchery....
"... having in mind our position as the great world neutral, and remembering that the people of these warring nations have been led into this conflict largely unwittingly, and therefore are largely blameless, we should announce our unalterable opposition to any plan to starve these innocent peoples involved in this conflict -- the women, the children, the sick, the aged, and the infirm -- and declare that when actual and bonafide mass starvation shall come to any of them, no matter who they are, we shall do all that we properly may do to see that they are furnished with food....
"If we shall rebuild our lost moral power and influence by measures such as these which will demonstrate our love for humanity, our justice, our fairmindedness ... we shall then be where ... we can offer mediation between the two belligerents.
"America, the great neutral, will thus become the Peacemaker of the world, which is her manifest destiny if she lives the law of peace." 278
A New Role for America?
Since the former Under-Secretary of State, J. Reuben Clark, Jr., gave this speech, the United States has been involved in three major wars, including the holocaust of World War II. Looking back, one cannot help wondering how much happier, more peaceful, and more prosperous the world would be if the United States had been following a policy of "separatism" as the world's great peacemaker instead of "internationalism" as the world's great policeman.
Twenty-Sixth Principle: The core unit which determines the strength of
any society is the family; therefore, the government should
foster and protect its integrity.
The family-centered culture which developed in America was not the austere pattern developed in England or the profligate pattern which characterized France. Alexis de Tocqueville compared the American family with that of Europe in the following words:
"There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated. In Europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasure of home is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and fluctuating desires. Agitated by the tumultuous passions that frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the state exact. But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace. There his pleasures are simple and natural, his joys are innocent and calm; and as he finds that an orderly life is the surest path to happiness, he accustoms himself easily to moderate his opinions as well as his tastes. While the European endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the American derives from his own home that love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public affairs." 279
Equality of Men and Women Under God's Law
"Father" and "Mother" Treated Equally in Scripture
The Early New England Family
A Note on Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin's Comment on Marriage
Responsibility of Parents to Children
What a Mature Adult Should Know
Responsibility of Children to Parents
The State Must Not Interfere with Legitimate Family Relations
Equality of Men and Women Under God's Law
The American Founders felt that the legal, moral, and social relationships between husband and wife were clearly established by Bible law under what Dr. H. Carlton Marlow has described as "differential" equality. 280
The husband and wife each have their specific rights appropriate to their role in life, and otherwise share all rights in common. The role of the man is "to protect and provide." The woman's role is to strengthen the family solidarity in the home and provide a wholesome environment for her husband and children. For the purpose of order, the man was given the decision-making responsibilities for the family; and therefore when he voted in political elections, he not only cast a ballot for himself, but also for his wife and children.
In theory, God's law made man first in governing his family, but as between himself and his wife he was merely first among equals. The Apostle Paul pointed out in his epistle to the Corinthians:
Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. (1 Corinthians 11:11.)
"Father" and "Mother" Treated Equally in Scripture
John Locke wrote his Second Essay Concerning Civil Government just as the colonies were becoming established, and his thinking was reflected in the family life-style of the American colonies more than in England itself. He stressed the equal responsibility of mother and father in rearing the children. He stated that the term "paternal authority"
"... seems so to place the power of parents over their children wholly in the father, as if the mother had no share in it; whereas if we consult reason or revelation, we shall find she has an equal title, which may give one reason to ask whether this might not be more properly called parental power? For whatever obligation Nature and the right of generation lays on children, it must certainly bind them equally to both the concurrent causes of it. And accordingly we see the positive law of God everywhere joins them together without distinction, when it commands the obedience of children: 'Honor thy father and thy mother' (Exodus 20:12); 'Whosoever curseth his father or his mother' (Leviticus 20:9); 'Ye shall fear every man his mother and his father' (Leviticus 19:3); 'Children, obey your parents' (Ephesians 6:1), etc., is the style of the Old and New Testament." 281
The Early New England Family
There is no doubt that the family life-style of early Americans contributed significantly to their success. Speaking of the early New England families, historian Wallace Notestein writes:
"It was the duty of husbands to love their wives and to have due regard for them. It was even suggested they should make financial allowances for them, as some Puritan gentlemen did, and give them a certain control over the household. What is more significant, Puritan writers had a great deal to say about the family and its unity. From diaries and biographies one gains an impression that husbands and wives in their common effort to bring about the kingdom of God on earth lived happily with one another. A common purpose was the best of all ties." 282
A Note on Benjamin Franklin
Not only was the unity of men and women emphasized, but also the complete interdependence of a man and a woman for their mutual happiness. It may seem strange to quote Benjamin Franklin on this subject, since certain historians have entertained the public for years with the alleged romantic profligacy of the famous Franklin. In point of fact, he admits in his autobiography that after running away from his home as a youth he fell in with certain rough companions and later had a son whom he named William. Nevertheless, he raised his son honorably, and William eventually became governor of New Jersey. With reference to Franklin's later life, a specialist on his papers and background at Yale University, Dr. Claude-Anne Lopez, says the stories about his "thirteen illegitimate children" and similar wild stories have proven to be myths. She says careful research is disclosing that Franklin was not the philanderer many writers have represented him to be. 283
Benjamin Franklin's Comment on Marriage
From his own pen, we have Franklin at the age of 46 emphasizing the importance of marriage as he attempted to dissuade a young friend from taking a mistress. He wrote:
"Marriage is the proper remedy. It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness. Your reasons aga
inst entering into it at present appear to me not well founded. The circumstantial advantages you have in view by postponing it are not only uncertain, but they are small in comparison with that of the thing itself, the being married and settled [emphasis by Franklin]. It is the man and woman united that make the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility, and acute discernment. Together they are more likely to succeed in the world. A single man has not nearly the value he would have in that state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors. If you get a prudent, healthy wife, your industry in your profession, with her good economy, will be a fortune sufficient." 284
Responsibility of Parents to Children
The trilateral construction of the family, consisting of father, mother, and children, raises the basic question of the duty of the parents to the children and the respect which the children owe their parents. Locke stated that the authority of parents over children is based on an important principle of natural law:
"The power, then, that parents have over their children arises from that duty which is incumbent on them, to take care of their offspring during the imperfect state of childhood. To inform the mind, and govern the actions of their yet ignorant nonage, till reason shall take its place and ease them of that trouble, is what the children want, and the parents are bound to [provide]." 285
What a Mature Adult Should Know
Locke then went on to point out that once a person has grown to adulthood and learned from experience and maturity the proper use of his reason, he should be capable of applying the revealed laws of God to his daily life:
"When he has acquired that state [of maturity], he is presumed to know how far that law is to be his guide, and how far he may make use of his freedom, and so comes to have it; till then, somebody else must guide him, who is presumed to know how far the law allows a liberty. If such a state of reason, such an age of discretion made him free, the same shall make his son free too. Is a man under the law of England? What made him free of that law -- that is, to have the liberty to dispose of his actions and possessions, according to his own will, within the permission of that law? A capacity of knowing that law, which is supposed, by that law, at the age of twenty one, and in some cases sooner. If this made the father free, it shall make the son free too. Till then, we see the law allows the son to have no will, but he is to be guided by the will of his father or guardian, who is to understand for him.... But after that [age of maturity is obtained] the father and son are equally free, as much as tutor and pupil after nonage, equally subjects of the same law together, without any dominion left in the father over the life, liberty, or estate of his son." 286
Responsibility of Children to Parents
Locke said that the reciprocal responsibility of children to honor and obey their parents is equally specific:
"As He [God] hath laid on them [the parents] an obligation to nourish, preserve, and bring up their offspring, so He has laid on the children a perpetual obligation of honoring their parents, which, containing in it an inward esteem and reverence to be shown by all outward expressions, ties up the child from anything that may ever injure or affront, disturb or endanger the happiness or life of those from whom he received his [life], and engages him in all actions of defense, relief, assistance, and comfort of those by whose means he entered into being and has been made capable of any enjoyments of life. From this obligation no state, no freedom, can absolve children." 287
The State Must Not Interfere with Legitimate Family Relations
The same permanence attaches to the responsibility which parents have for minor children. As Locke said:
"The subjection of a minor places in the father a temporary government which terminates with the minority of the child.... The nourishment and education of their children [during their minority] is a charge so incumbent on parents for their children's good, that nothing can absolve them from taking care of it." 288
It will be appreciated that the strength and stability of the family is of such vital importance to the culture that any action by the government to debilitate or cause dislocation in the normal trilateral structure of the family becomes, not merely a threat to the family involved, but a menace to the very foundations of society itself.
"Think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty." (Benjamin Franklin)
Twenty-Seventh Principle: The burden of debt is as destructive
to freedom as subjugation by conquest.
"Think what you do when you run in debt; you give to
another the power over your liberty." -- Benjamin Franklin
Slavery or involuntary servitude is the result of either subjugation by conquest or succumbing to the bondage of debt.
Debt, of course, is simply borrowing against the future. It exchanges a present advantage for a future obligation. It will require not only the return of the original advance of funds, but a substantial compensation to the creditor for the use of his money.
How Debt Can Benumb the Human Spirit
The Founders' Attitude Toward Debt
Debts from Splurge Spending
Benjamin Franklin on Splurge Spending
The Founders' Policy Concerning a National Debt
Should One Generation Impose Its Debts on the Next?
Jefferson Considered an Inherited Debt Immoral
The Founders Establish the Policy of Paying Debts Promptly
The History of the American National Debt
The Risk in Violating Fundamental Principles
Splurge Spending Is Habit-Forming
Today We Are Spending the Next Generation's Inheritance
The Problem of the "Fix"
How Can the United States Return to the Founders' Formula?
How Debt Can Benumb the Human Spirit
The Founders knew that borrowing can be an honorable procedure in a time of crisis, but they deplored it just the same. They looked upon it as a temporary handicap which should be alleviated at the earliest possible moment. They had undergone sufficient experience with debt to see its corrosive and debilitating effect, which tends to corrupt both individuals and nations.
In the case of the individual, excessive debt greatly curtails the freedom of the debtor. It benumbs his spirit, He often feels hesitant to seek a new location or change a profession. He passes up financial opportunities which a free man might risk. Heavy debt introduces an element of taint into a man's search for happiness. There seems to be a perpetual burden every waking hour. There is a sense of being perpetually threatened as he rides the razor's edge of potential disaster.
There is also the sense of waste -- much like the man who has to make payments on a dead horse. It is money spent for pleasures or even needs that are long since past, It often means sleepless nights, recoiling under the burden of a grinding weight which is constantly increasing with every tick of the clock, and often at usurious rates.
The Founders' Attitude Toward Debt
The Founding Fathers belonged to an age when debt was recognized for the ugly spectre that it really is. They considered frugality a virtue, and even when an emergency compelled them to borrow, they believed in borrowing frugally and paying back promptly. Nearly everyone finds it to his advantage or absolute necessity to borrow on occasion. Debt becomes the only available means -- a necessary evil. Nevertheless, the Founders wanted the nature of debt to be recognized for what it is: evil, because it is a form of bondage.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"The maxim of buying nothing without the money in our pockets to pay for it would make our country one of the happiest on earth. Experience during the war proved this; and I think every man will remember that, under all the privations it obliged him to submit to during that period, he slept sounder and awoke happier than he can do now." 289
Debts from Splurge Spending
The Founders felt that the worst kind of debt is that
which results from "splurge" borrowing -- going into debt to enjoy the temporary luxury of extravagantly living "beyond one's means." They knew the seductive snare which this possibility presents to the person who is watching other people do it. The English author William Makepeace Thackeray reflected those feelings when he wrote these words in Vanity Fair: "How well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt: how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds." 290
The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World Page 22
