Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on November 21, 2012

in Budget Issues, Debt and Deficits, Other People's Money, Reality Is Not Optional

… is from David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of Public Credit,” (here from page 352 of the 1985 Liberty Fund collection of Hume’s essays, edited by the late Eugene Miller, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary):

The practice, therefore, of contracting debt will almost infallibly be abused, in every government.  It would scarcely be more imprudent to give a prodigal son a credit in every banker’s shop in London, than to impower a statesman to draw bills, in this manner, upon posterity.

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