Can We Learn from the Past?
Or is the Quote “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” no longer applicable?
By Al Bliss 
July 24, 2011 

The continuing effort by our government to resolve the debt limit issue while considering tax increases and folks on the dole stimulated a bit of research into comments made by leaders in yesteryear. The following quotes are intended to generate questions and make your gray matter function. Comments after some of the quotes are inserted to help the gray matter get started. 

“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” Cicero - approximately 86 years BCE. 

“Give me control over a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.” Baron M.A. Rothschild (1744 - 1812) 

The Federal Reserve authorizes the Treasury to print money with no direction or approval from the House of Representatives. Tim Geithner (Secretary of the Treasury) and Ben Bernake (Chairman of the Federal Reserve) have both been actively involved in national economic policy decisions for twenty years but no economic problems are attributed to either of them. 

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government -- lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” Patrick Henry - May 29, 1736 – June 6, 1799) 

Read and remember the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. 

“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to The Ten Commandments of God.” James Madison, Father of the U.S. Constitution. 

The tenth amendment places ultimate responsibility on the individual but only if the individual takes the necessary steps to govern themselves. 

“In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.” Thich Nhat Hanh  (Vietnamese Monk, b.1926) 

Does the process of class action fall within the thought process of inventing an enemy? Who describes certain classes as the enemy of the people? 

“A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.  Ayn Rand b. Feb. 2, 1905 - Author 

Read and remember the second amendment and why it was considered so vital to the formation of the Constitution. 

“That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.” Henry David Thoreau - July 12, 1817(1817-07-12) - May 6, 1862(1862-05-06) 

The first quote considered was from Cicero before the Christian era started. It was recorded over two thousand years ago and is very applicable to our current government crisis. 

What are your thoughts?

Al Bliss