Livin' on borrowed time

We frequently hear the U.S. is the freest nation in the world. Hardly. This week I heard someone say "freedom is not the ability to choose. Freedom results from making right choices." I believe that is profoundly correct. The simple, unfettered 'ability to choose' approach is what has disintegrated into today's licentiousness: give me what I want, right now, and never mind the consequences.

The latter approach, though, takes into account future repercussions of one's choices. This avoids selling your future treasures on a whim of the moment.

Because we've been in overdrive for more than a generation, we've drastically, perhaps fatally, limited our future options when it comes to federal spending. This is not the definition of freedom. We have sold ourselves into debt, and a day of reckoning always comes for those who make such choices. Some say it is already here. This is larger than one administration's tax cuts. It's the culmination of forty years or more of ever-increasing spending, as Americans looked to Uncle Sam, instead of their own energies, to live a better life. His credit card had a higher limit than anyone, so we left the tab with him...only to discover the bill gets mailed to each and every one of us in ways we could not possibly have imagined.

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.
If we run into such debt, 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 calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments.
A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another ]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery...
And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt.
Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."
-Thomas Jefferson