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An excellent essay posted by Ric Locke over at the PW Pub that I read this morning brings to mind a letter Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote to Henry S. Randall, where Macaulay is predicting the future of America, pointing out some of the pitfalls of our democratically-styled government (and predicts that, given our constitution, America will eventually fall to barbarians.)

"Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your labouring population will be far more at ease than the labouring population of the old world; and, while that is the case, the Jeffersonian polity may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.

"But time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be low, and will fluctuate with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams, hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then, your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot get a full meal.

...

"...I cannot help forbodeing the worst. It is quite plain that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority...The day will come when....a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expect to have more than half a dinner, will chose a Legislature....On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights...On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists....and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink Champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessities..."

This letter, written in 1857, seems to exactly define the politics of our friends on the Left, who are always overstating the minor distresses of our nation, pointing out the goods and privileges of our successful and wealthy (ignoring, of course, that the overall standards of living in the U.S. are the highest they've ever been, and higher than all but the Dubais of the world) for the puerile purpose of securing votes that will put into power these modern Democrats. Who are antithesis, it seems, to our original constitution.

If the Democrat's policies are put into place as they want them (the cradle-to-grave sustenance they presume the majority of Americans so desire, the increased taxation of the wealthy based on material jealousy, the foreign policy based on "what the Rest of the World thinks of us!") there would eventually be a collapse of capitalism. Socialism, as Leftists want it, means only one thing... "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." "The goal of socialism is communism. " "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. "

Enough Marx and Lenin. Back to Macaulay...

"Your constitution is all sail and no anchor.... Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your republic will be...laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth Century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth;—with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions."

Let's just hope that we can keep the enablers of these modern-day Huns and Vandals out of office.

Vote Republican, 2008

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Crossposted to the PW Pub