“A republic, if you can keep it [up].”
– Benjamin Franklin
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July 1, 2024— Chris Conley, a writer we’ve been reading lately, and a friend were having dinner near the Blue Lagoon in Iceland on Friday, the night after the debate. The waitress was “Hungarian and hilarious” says Chris:
“America has ‘electile dysfunction’ and it’s no surprise that these two bad candidates were talking about their handicaps at the end of the debate because they both have a lot of handicaps.”
Personally, I watched the debate last from the Rancho Santa in Nicaragua. Before the “resort” was developed in the 2010s, I used to lead real estate investment tours there. This year, it was just me and my immediate family. I did my best to stay off my phone and laptop.
Avoiding the television is easy there, except last week the Copa America (soccer) was playing, so most times the featured match was on somewhere.
At the bar in La Finca el Mar, the rather high end restaurant at the heart of the 5,000 hectare property, there are always a number of nationalities present. Most are either American or from one of the various Latin American countries.
For the most part, people tuned into the debate for its entertainment value.
It didn’t take long for the amusement to contort to amazement. How could American democracy, the oldest continuous democratic republic today, a standard bearer for countries with similar political aspirations, allow its two political parties to come to these two geriatrics as our only choice?
Foreigners are disheartened. Most Americans there have already chosen alternative strategies for their living arrangement, residency or investments. But from an outside perspective, it’s truly bizarre.
The “American Experiment” in democracy turns 248 this week, if you use the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence as the kicking off point.
The United States is geographically suited to have its own run at building a republic.
While there are older nations in existence, such as France, the United Kingdom, Greece … America is unique in that it has had the same system of government since the Constitution was ratified in 1789.
In contrast, over the same period, France is on its fifth republic, after two periods as an empire. Italy and Germany had to unify small provinces into a nation, and also flirted with empire.
While America is a twisted empire of debt today it was never designed to be. For years, we used to celebrate the week by writing about The Idea of America: What It Was and How It Was Lostassembled and edited by Bill Bonner and Pierre Lemieux.
This seems like an appropriate week to bring back the tradition.
We first published the Idea of America in 2003 through a French sister company called Les Belles Lettres. Then, in 2011, we updated it and sold it through our then pet-project, Laissez Faire Books.
The volume conveniently provides a number of America’s foundational and fundamental documents. Plus, some equally as important historical essays, which have somehow become unorthodox and radical by today’s mainstream biases, and a range of editorial comments.
Below is the foreword to the book, which sets the tone for Bonner and Lemieux’s work.
“I highly recommend The Idea of America to anyone interested in the animating spirit of American origins,” wrote the honorable Dr. Ron Paul, then a member of the House of Representatives, for our 2nd edition. Enjoy ~~ Addison
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The Idea of America: What It Was and How It Was Lost
Bill Bonner, The Idea of America
After Sept. 11, 2001, so many people bought flags that the shops ran short. Old Glory festooned nearly every porch and bridge. Patriotism swelled every heart.
Europeans coming back to the Old Country reported that they had never seen anything like it. A Frenchman takes his country for granted. He is born into it, just as he is born into his religion. He may be proud of La Belle France the way he is proud of his cheese. But he is not fool enough to claim credit for either one. He just feels lucky to have them for his own.
America, by contrast, is a nation of people who chose to become Americans. Even the oldest family tree in the New World has immigrants at its root. And where did its government, its courts, its businesses, and its saloons come from? They were all invented by us. Having chosen the country—and made it what it is—Americans feel more responsibility for what it has become than the citizens of most other nations. And they take more pride in it, too.
But what is it? What has it become? What makes America different from any other nation? Why should we care more about it than about, say, Lithuania, or Chad?
Most Americans, if pressed for an answer, would reply, “Because America is a free country.” What else can be said of the place? Its landmass is as varied as the Earth itself. Inhabiting the sands of Tucson as well as the steppes of Alaska, Americans could as well be called a desert race as an arctic one. Its religions are equally diverse—from mossbacked Episcopalians of the Virginia Tidewater to the holy rollers of east Texas and the Muslims of east Harlem. Nor does blood itself give the country any mark of distinction. The individual American has more in common genetically with the people his people come from than with his fellow Americans. In a DNA test, this writer is more likely to be mistaken for an IRA hit man than a Baltimore drug dealer.
America never was a nation in the usual sense of the word. Though there are plenty of exceptions—especially among the made-up nations of former European colonies—nations are usually composed of groups of people who share common blood, a common culture, and a common language.
Americans mostly speak English, but they might just as well speak Spanish. And at the debut of the republic, the Founding Fathers narrowly avoided declaring German the official language—at least that is the legend. A Frenchman has to speak French. A German has to speak the language of the Vaterland. But an American could speak anything. And often does.
Nor is there even a common history. The average immigrant didn’t arrive until the early twentieth century. By then, America’s history was already three centuries old. The average family missed the whole thing.
If Americans weren’t united by blood, history, religion, or language— what else is left? Only an idea: that you could come to America and be whatever you wanted to be. You might have been a bog-trotter in Ireland or a baron in Silesia; in America, you were free to become whatever you could make of yourself.
“Give me liberty or give me death!” said Patrick Henry, raising the rhetorical stakes and praying no one would call him on it. Yet the average man at the time lived in near-perfect freedom. There were few books and few laws on them. And there were fewer people to enforce them. Henry, if he wanted to do so, could have merely crossed the Blue Ridge west of Charlottesville and never seen another government agent again.
Thomas Jefferson complained, in the Declaration of Independence, that Britain had “erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People and eat out their Substance.” Yet the swarms of officers sent by George III would have barely filled a mid-sized regional office of the IRS or city zoning department today.
Likewise, the Founding Fathers kvetched about taxation without representation. But history has shown that representation only makes taxation worse. Kings, emperors, and tyrants must keep tax rates low; otherwise, the people rise in rebellion. It is democrats who really eat out the substance of the people: The illusion of self-government lets them get away with it. Tax rates were only an average of 3% under the tyranny of King George III. Among the dubious blessings of democracy are average tax rates that are 10 times as high.
“Americans today,” wrote Rose Wilder Lane in 1936, after the Lincoln administration had annihilated the principle of self-government—but before the Roosevelt team had finished its work—“are the most reckless and lawless of peoples” but, she immediately continued, “we are also the most imaginative, the most temperamental, the most infinitely varied.”
But by the end of the twentieth century, Americans were required to wear seatbelts and they ate low-fat yogurt without a gun to their heads. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, they were submitting to strip searches at airport terminals and demanding higher taxes to protect freedom. The recklessness seems to have been bred out of them. And the variety, too. North, south, east, and west, people all wear the same clothes and cherish the same ideas. Liberty has been hollowed out in modern America, but it is still worshipped as though it were a religious relic.
~~ Bill Bonner, The Idea of America
So it goes,
Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Wiggin Sessions
P.S.: How did we get here? An alternative view of the financial, economic, and political history of the United States from Demise of the Dollar through Financial Reckoning Day and on to Empire of Debt — all three books are available in their third post-pandemic editions.
(Or… simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites:Bookshop.org; Books-A-Million; or Target.)
Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
