Courage!

I'm with Jonah. This is creepy. But it isn't just creepy: it's shallow and unfounded feel-goodism masquerading as courageous hope.

Establishing the ideal of self-government is a remarkably difficult thing; it is only slightly less difficult than retaining it. Too easily to we reverence the man and forget that his office has limits prescribed by a document more than 200 years old. The Constitution requires that each look to himself first...but we are more democratic now. The tyranny of mob-rule lurks in every corner.

Agent Kay was right: people are indeed "dumb panicky dangerous animals". There are few indeed who will not jump at the chance to be saved from the responsibilities of liberty. But lest we think wavering courage in the face of uncertain times a creature peculiar to our own times, we have only to seek the reconstructed text of a speech that graces our public vocabulary with the remembered phrase, "Give me liberty or give me death!"

Patrick Henry spoke in 1775, less than a month before the famous battles of Lexington and Concord, and without the benefit of hindsight. The temptations of illusory hope were as real then as they are now, and faced with a choice between the endless economic growth regardless of irresponsible credit, and immediate economic ruin with the hope of recovery on more solid ground, we should stand with Henry in considering this a choice between liberty and slavery. Like Henry, we should declare that, "whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it."

We face a reckoning for economic sins that no amount of credit or expenditure can avert, for indeed they are at the roots of the problem! Demanding that the biggest and most lascivious spender of us all spend yet more so that we may be absolved is but the vomiting of an alcoholic unwilling to be sobered. We ought to be ashamed.

If we must face penury, we will teach our children thrift. But let our proud cry be heard: "Only let me be free, and I shall be glad to be poor!"

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