From the Editors Desk March 2020

Your editor wrote an article that was published in September 2001 in this magazine entitled, “A Special News Alert – Is Economic Babylon on the Brink”. Among other revelations it discussed the negative effect of debt in our Nations’ and our peoples’ lives, including the then financial derivatives market, which was estimated at some 100 to 170 trillion dollars, [now probably in excess of a trillion dollars] most of which were off-balance sheet items. Revelation 18:10 tells us, “Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come”. The extent of the National Debt is equally frightening. We were certainly warned enough times, here is one of the voices of caution.

Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Previously, he had served as the second vice president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. Here is what he told us to watch. (From the Making of America, p. 395)

“…And to preserve their independence, 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 debts 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 callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have not time to think, no means of calling the mismanager’s to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers…”