…Donald Trump was probably the only political player who never wanted, nor needed, additional money.
This is why Donald Trump is a political enigma, and the entire political class is unable to even begin to fathom his true political purposes…any more than you can fathom my own in broaching this subject.
Still, certain natural laws apply in the continuance of citizens deciding what is best for their own private interests, even after 248 years…without depriving other citizens of those same rights. This is the key element found in the creation of “United States of America” that is not found in the governance other nations, most of them much older.
Few, if any are able to build, hold onto, and then pass on, a society, such as our forefathers created with the “United States of America”.
Although I’ve yet to find a single study that links the work of the known and respected 53 year-old English economic philosopher Adam Smith in 1776 to the much shorter treatise about the creation and use of privately-earned small business wealth by the 39 year-old English-born public school graduate named Thomas Paine…also written in 1776, I’ve found that both Smith and Paine’s observations were spot on, only they targeted a different time frame of the citizenry..
But it truly was Paine’s 53-page treatise named Common Sense that literally caused the American citizens to rise up throughout their colonies and demand of their representatives stationed at Independence Hall to write a “declaration of independence” that would then be passed over to the King, living in England. And with Thomas Jefferson’s gifted script, they did. Of course King George III resoundingly said “NO” and the American Revolution quickly followed, and we did win that war, and our independence with it, as you all know, only you likely don’t know how it happened, or why, especially if you were born after 1980. (There’s a reason for that, by the way, and it is called “The Law of Generations”, which I mention regularly in this book, and which is a condition that we most need to turn around, without a shooting war, if at all possible.)
A philosopher, Adam Smith by contrast, had no immediate time target in mind. He was not writing for the “popular market” and published his studies in The Wealth of Nations, and was also been proven true. While both men were proven correct, Thomas Paine worked up his home-based thesis on grass roots political philosophy of liberty, Adam Smith’s thesis was proved correct over a longer haul.
Clearly, America is not a freak of Nature.
And as our early colonial governments grew more skilled, even sophisticated, various kinds of opportunities for making money arose for people who “knew somebody” who could bring a needed public transaction to a close. Almost every society in the world has had a system that caused these sorts of things to happen. That is called “politics”, and it had wormed itself into every political interaction between people and their stronger unelected leaders since the beginning of time.
This struggle is never ending.
Bottom line, the person who first taught ordinary American voters and citizens about those things was the young man named Thomas Paine, just 36, but who in many ways was not eaten up with envy for wealth or power in order to make a name for himself. He simply wanted to be able explain to ordinary citizens in Colonial America “how things work”…both in Nature as well as in the working political relationship between citizens and the various kinds of government Man when the citizens create it.
Because he sat down and wrote an easy-to-read book about it, no one, no one, has ever explained it better than Thomas Paine.
And because Thomas Paine was not of the ruling political class, educated more by the religious texts of the Old and New Testaments, he approached the subject of government from-the-bottom-up, using common sense to explaining his thesis to the average American. Bottom line, he was able to produce a book of fewer than 60 pages and which, to date, per capita, is the most successful book in America, for it enabled the citizens to design a government that works to suit their needs and purposes versus meeting the needs, wants, and desires of the government class.
And it has for almost 250 years.
But by 1782 Thomas Paine had just sort of dropped off the map. (His personal story afterwards is also instructive, having little to do with the development of our government, or human liberty or the ability of Man to individually engage in the exercise of self-government. One of the primary architects of America’s founding Revolution, which also started a shooting war (keep this in mind) Thomas Paine had laid this common sense foundation to how a society might organize itself from the bottom up, in order to produce food, thus defining the real politics of a nation, but moved on to another cause, which he saw in Europe….and he chose the wrong side.
That is the challenge that stands before us, as we look upon one, maybe two generations of Americans who currently are oblivious to the Natural Law forces that brought us into being, and secured our survival. A full century in, we paid a heavy price for overlooking the cost of believing we could hold onto to our liberty while buying-and-selling other people of many different kinds into slavery. And we have begun to neglect that in all man’s history, our nation is the only one that has voluntarily offered its young men to die for the freedom of people we have never seen. Americans were the first to do this over 165 years ago, and sadly, are still the only ones.
