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I BelieveGovernance and Philosophy in America Author: Joel K. Douglas
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Philosophy and the One Big Beautiful Bill: Debt vs Property, Promise, and the Dead’s Silent Claim
Monday, 7 July, 2025
The One Big Beautiful Bill: A PoemOur lives pass like shadows, despair takes root within us. We convince ourselves property is our natural right; that we can own the land here before us, remaining when we are gone. We guard it jealously, believing what we earn must remain ours alone. We charge our leaders with duty: to defend our lives, our liberty, our property. Yet to do so, we bury the unborn beneath our debt. One generation fades, another rises. The earth endures; we are dust, mere travelers through a brief season. We tax our days with worry and grief over troubles we might never see. We borrow endlessly, debts stretching beyond bearing; chains placed silently upon shoulders yet unborn. They never chose, never consented. The dead hold no rights over the living, yet we, the living, pledge away a future’s harvest, earnings of lives not yet begun. Theft, delayed. When we pass, soon enough, what do we gain from our toil if all we leave behind is burden? …We say we protect property by cutting taxes. So our question: Can we protect what we own today by stealing from the unborn?Debt Versus PropertyOur lives pass like shadows, and despair grows in us. We tax our days and wring our hands with worry and grief over what may never come. No matter how hard we labor, what we own eventually passes to others. We arrive with nothing, leave with nothing, and gain nothing from our labor that we will take with us.And it makes us worry.Our humanity creates this problem. Aware of our smallness and short time on earth, we gather what we can and hold tight. We want to keep it. Even when our children die, we carry the feed bucket anyway. The desire to keep what we’ve earned is as old as the first harvest, the first hands that grasped their work with pride.Out of this hope came the idea of property as a right; that no ruler, mob, or distant power could unjustly take what we’ve earned. This belief is freedom itself. If our labor belongs to us, we are free. If it can be seized, we are servants, whether our master is king, neighbor, or voting majority.We established laws to protect what we earn, rules that say no one’s wages, harvest, or home can be taken without true cause. Protecting property safeguards liberty.When we are free to keep what we work for, we can express our being. We can choose. We can grow from the effects of those choices. That is liberty.But liberty has a cost. To protect our property today, we’ve embraced a dangerous shortcut: borrowing from tomorrow. We say cutting taxes preserves our property, that government should take only what it must. But instead of paying the cost with our own labor, we mortgage the lives of our unborn children. We pass the bill forward to generations who have no voice.This is our tension. Our contradiction.We protect the property of the living by indebting those not yet born. We say no one should steal from us, but we steal from those who will follow, who have no vote, no voice, no choice.PromiseWe made a promise in property, and a promise in liberty. We believe a person is entitled to the fruits of their own labor. That what they build, they may keep. That no power, however great, may seize it without just cause. If this is not so, then no man is free.But this promise carries another. If a person is entitled to the fruits of their labor, then we cannot buy our comfort with another’s sweat. We cannot, by our actions, burden those who had no voice.Yet today we break both promises at once. We declare no one may take what’s ours, that no ruler or future vote may steal it. But in the same breath, we pledge the labor of unborn generations to pay our debts.This contradiction cannot stand. A nation cannot uphold a principle and violate it simultaneously. We cannot protect today’s harvest while mortgaging tomorrow’s.Seed corn is the harvest reserved for planting next year’s crop. Eat it today, and we survive, but guarantee starvation tomorrow.We must not consume our children’s seed corn or warm ourselves by burning their future fuel. Liberty isn’t free. It cannot be bought with debt or paid with the wages of those yet to be born and who cannot speak, vote, or stand for themselves.If we believe in keeping what we earn, we must guard it ourselves, paying our cost today. Spending our children’s money means standing for a principle even as we betray it.An America built on contradiction will not survive.Broken promises bleed forward, generation to generation, until only the dead remain to answer.The Dead’s Silent ClaimThe dead hold no claim over the living. The next generation owes nothing to the bones beneath the grass.Every age must choose for itself. Every generation must decide which burdens it will bear, which debts it will pay, and which work it will complete.We have erred. We claim to protect our property, to keep what is ours, to stand free. But we build our freedom on promises made with labor not our own. We insist future generations pay debts we refuse to shoulder today.This cannot stand. Freedom and bondage cannot coexist. We cannot guard our harvest by mortgaging someone else’s future. A nation cannot love liberty while chaining children who never chose their burden.We call ourselves defenders of property, but we steal from tomorrow. With one hand we raise our fists and shout ‘freedom!’ With the other, we tighten our chains.If reason has a law, it must be this:A generation cannot call itself free while binding the next.The dead have no rights over the living. Neither do we have any right to seize from those not yet born, to pile debt on backs that have yet to draw breath.We claim to guard what is ours, but we have promised away what was never ours to promise.Back to our question: Can we protect what we own today by stealing from the unborn?May God bless the United States of America, and grant us the courage to pay our debts today before we ask our children to pay what they do not owe.Music from #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/t/roo-walker/courage License code: DCL6TJYRATU8RIUS Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe
