In his speech today urging Americans to increase the size of government control still further, President Obama quoted Thomas Jefferson: “We have engaged in fierce and passionate debates about the issues of the day, but from slavery to war, from civil liberties to questions of economic justice, we have tried to live by the words that Jefferson once wrote: ‘Every man cannot have his way in all things…Without this mutual disposition, we are disjointed individuals, but not a society.’”
One might mention that with regard to slavery, that it was only when we refused to compromise that slavery came to an end, but aside from that, here’s something else Thomas Jefferson said:
We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.
Thomas Jefferson knew better than most people when it was okay to compromise and when it was unacceptable to compromise. He’s just not on your side, Mr. President.
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