Neither will it follow that an accumulation of debt is desirable, because a certain degree of it operates as capital. There may be a plethora in the political as in the natural body; there may be a state of things in which any such artificial capital is unnecessary. The debt, too, may be swelled to such a size as that the greatest part of it may cease to be useful as capital, serving only to pamper the dissipation of idle and dissolute individuals; as that the sum required to pay the interest upon it may become oppressive and beyond the means which a government can employ consistently with its tranquility to raise them; as that the resources of taxation to face the debt may have been strained too far to admit of extensions adequate to exigencies which regard the public safety.
Where this critical point is cannot be pronounced, but it is impossible to believe that there is not such a point.
And as the vicissitudes of nations beget a perpetual tendency to the accumulation of debt, there ought to be in every government a perpetual, anxious, and unceasing effort to reduce that which at any time exists as fast as shall be practicable consistently with integrity and good faith.
DBx: Keep in mind that this warning of excessive government debt was issued by a man who was not as fearful of such debt as were many others of his generation.
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It’s too bad that in today’s U.S. government there is nothing remotely close to “a perpetual, anxious, and unceasing effort to reduce” government indebtedness “as fast as shall be practicable consistently with integrity and good faith.” Too many politicians and pundits treat government debt as, if not a freebie, an easy and always-acceptable means of funding today’s government expenditures with little or no risk to the public fisc or to the well-being of future citizens-taxpayers.
