''All too many Americans for all too long have been conditioned to think of “the federal government” in terms of “higher” and “lower” levels as on some crude bureaucratic organizational chart: with Washington, D.C. at the top, the States and THE PEOPLE at the bottom.''
The more things
change, the more they remain the same. In 1814, in an address to the House of Representatives, Daniel Webster observed that
public credit, the last reliance of government, * * * does not exist. This is a state of things calling for the soberest counsels, and yet it seems to meet only the wildest speculations. Nothing is talked of but banks, and a circulating paper medium, and exchequer notes, and the thousand other contrivances which ingenuity, vexed and goaded by the direst necessity, can devise, with the vain hope of giving value to mere paper. All these things are not revenue, nor do they produce it. * * * [N]or is there a device more shallow or more mischievous, than to pour forth new floods of paper without credit as a remedy for the evils which paper without credit has already created.[1]
Even earlier, Thomas Jefferson had predicted the reason for such a sorry state of affairs:
From the conclusion of the [W]ar [of Independence] we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights.[2]
Jefferson was all too prescient. Ever since his day, the political class has looked elsewhere than to the American people for support—and always found it from the financial class. http://www.newswithviews.com/Vieira/edwin200.htm