Bond Servants

In The President, which I wrote eighteen years ago, there is an African-American pastor who laments how the federal government has become the world’s largest plantation, keeping Black Americans down.

Now, sadly, all Americans of every color are being driven to lives of servitude by and under that same government.

The definition of a bond servant in the dictionary is one who works for no wages, often under duress.

As I pointed out in the previous post, with today’s level of government debt (no increase) and historic interest rates, an average tax-paying family of five will owe $1,400 per monthto pay the interest on that debt.  Just the interest.

So a working, tax-paying American will become a bond servant to the government.  There are at least two ironies with that term today.  We will actually be servants to our government’s bonds, not to another person.  And some people in the past volunteered to become bond servants in order to achieve a better life in the future, i.e., they exchanged a set number of years of work for passage to the New World.  But in our case, our servitude will be to the past, and we will be permanent servants, paying interest on old debt that did little or no good (not enough shovel ready projects, I guess).

But, at least in theory, there will be an alternative.  Why would we work to pay that level of tax when we can quit, join the half of Americans who are not similarly burdened with  income tax, and move onto the plantation?

That will be our future choice: to work and pay astronomical taxes, or to quit and become part of the entitlement class.

And, tragically, instead of our nation’s incentives encouraging a productive life, the incentives will be stacked towards working less, and taking from other

How well do you think that will work out for us?  Who will be the last person actually holding a shovel?

That is why reducing the level of our national debt is, in my mind, the single most important issue in the upcoming election.

By the way, the dictionary defines the opposite of bond servant as a “free man, independent”.