Historian Predicted America's Financial Collapse... in 1857
Reblogged from directorblue.blogspot.com
The Great British historian, Lord Macaulay,
predicted the future unraveling of the United States economy in a letter
written in May 1857. Macaulay’s prediction was based on his analysis of
American institutions. Discussing the life of Thomas Jefferson with an
American author, Macaulay wrote, “You are surprised to learn that I have
not a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson, and I am surprised at your
surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line, and … uttered a word
indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a state ought to be
entrusted to the majority of citizens [counted] by the head; in other
words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society.”
According
to Macaulay the United States was becoming increasingly democratic
throughout the nineteenth century. And this tendency, he argued, was
dangerous to liberty and to the country’s economic well-being.
As
Macaulay explained, “I have long been convinced that institutions purely
democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or
both.”
Macaulay pointed to the French Revolution and to the
tendency of democratic movements to despoil the rich. “You may think
that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils,” Macaulay wrote
to his American correspondent. “I will frankly own to you that I am of a
very different opinion. 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 laboring population will be far more
at ease than the laboring population of the Old World, and, while that
is the case, the Jefferson politics may continue to exist without
causing any fatal calamity.”
Eventually, of course, the United
States must fill up with people. It must lose its economic advantages.
“[T]he time will come, noted Macaulay, “when New England will be as
thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate
as much with you as with us.” America will then be urbanized, with a
large population of “artisans.” Then it will happen that large numbers
of these artisans will sometimes find themselves out of work. “Then your
institutions will be fairly brought to the test,” wrote Macaulay.
“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.”
With the
supreme power in the hands of a discontented multitude, what kind of
government are they likely to elect? Would it be a government committed
to “the security of property and the maintenance of order”? Or would it
be a government that gets through hard times by robbing the rich “to
relieve the indigent”? Eventually, wrote Macaulay, the Jeffersonian
bent of the United States will result in the destruction of property,
the plundering of the wealthy. “It is quite plain that your government
will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority.
For with you the majority is the government, and the rich, who are
always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.”
As we see today, all
levels of government in America are involved in relieving the distress
of the poor and unemployed, and we also see that this is presently
accomplished by taxing the rich as well as by taking on debt. Presently
the United States has the most progressive income tax system in the
industrialized world with the rich paying more than half of all income taxes. As for the accumulation of debt, the gross public debt of the United States exceeds 160 percent of GDP; and this figure necessarily represents the future despoliation of the rich through inflation and/or future taxation.
The
process that Macaulay wrote about, therefore, is well on its way. “I
seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I
have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from
returning,” wrote Macaulay to his American correspondent; “that you will
act like people who should in a year of scarcity devour all the
seed-corn, and thus make the next a year not of scarcity, but of
absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will
increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There
is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.”
As the process of unraveling continues, he added, “Either some Caesar or
Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your
republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians …
as the Roman Empire….”
Today our barbarians are not represented by external tribes. Today the barbarian is an internal problem. In The Undiscovered Self,
the psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote: “Separation from his instinctual
nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between
conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a
split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no
longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side.” As Jung
further explained, “the accumulation of individuals who have got into
this critical state starts off a mass movement purporting to be the
champion of the oppressed. In accordance with the prevailing tendency of
consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world, the
cry goes up for political and social changes.” And what happens next,
according to Jung? Society’s “underside comes to the top and the shadow
takes the place of the light….”
Here is the psychological process
at work inside every communist revolution. The movement of the oppressed
against the rich becomes a pathological outbreak, with dire
consequences. A criminal political class gains the upper hand. Plunder
takes place on an unprecedented scale. “The Communist revolution has
debased man far lower than democratic collective psychology has done,
because it robs him of his freedom not only in the social but in the
moral and spiritual sphere,” wrote Jung. Not only is the economy
destroyed, but mankind sinks into immorality. This debasement, said
Jung, could bring more than economic collapse. As Jung pointed out, “It
needs only an almost imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few
of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire, and
radioactivity.”
It seems perfectly clear that we are presently
headed for spoliation as described by Macaulay. We are already acting
like people who respond to scarcity by devouring our seed-corn, “and
thus make the next a year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine.” And
as Carl Jung explained, the debasement that follows is not merely
economic, but spiritual as well. We see all the signs around us. We see
the political situation developing apace. What Macaulay wrote makes
perfect sense today, especially when we are watching his prediction
unfold before our very eyes.
Visit J.R. Nyquist's website at JRNyquist.com
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