America's Achilles Heel

By David Hobbs

This is a letter-to-the-editor I sent to our local paper which was printed today, appropriately enough, Sept. 11th.

Dear Editor,

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political historian came to the newly formed United States of America to see what made this unique nation work. For 9 months he traveled extensively throughout the nation, studying its institutions and talking with its people. After returning home, this man of amazing insight wrote the classic, Democracy in America. This widely read and quoted book is still required reading in many American History classes.

De Tocqueville, though he was very impressed by what he saw, also accurately pinpointed our Achilles heel. He wrote, "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

About 50 years earlier, Alexander Tytler, a Scottish professor who studied ancient Greek democracies, similarly wrote, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury."

Our national debt is estimated to reach $18.6 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2015 [Sept. 30th] That’s the equivalent of laying a string of $20 bills from the earth to the sun (94 million miles). What’s the politicians’ response to this monstrous debt? Hillary Clinton is advocating the government start providing free college tuition! Can anyone still doubt this country has reached the end of the line predicted 200 years ago?

But it’s not the politicians’ fault. We the people have consistently voted for the candidates promising the most benefits. Like the worst credit card junkies, we have run up bills we can never pay, yet are looking for ways to spend even more! If a man is bleeding to death, what good does it do to fill him with blood transfusions if you can’t stop the bleeding? Even so, if our tremendous debt could be magically cancelled, what would it help? We would go right on spending money we don’t have until our new debt surpassed the old one. Our Achilles heel is about to topple us. There is an evitable crash coming. Do you see any way out?

Comment

This was my final letter in a series of warnings to my community and the church of impending judgment. Now that this letter has been published, I feel I have fulfilled my ministry as a watchman, before God, to my community. I also sent a 10 page letter to all the pastors in our extended area, (about 170 of them), warning that this country was about to implode spiritually. This was based on a newly released book about a spirit of self-loathing that has taken hold of especially the elites in this country. This is a sure sign of impended destruction, because that which you loathe, you will not fight to save.

An interesting point about today's letter is that I wrote it without any reference to God and His righteous judgments. I wanted to show to those who don't believe in God and reject any idea of a God who would bring judgment, that even without God, this country is about to fall of its own weight, caused by factors of its own making. We are the ones who voted for leaders who have bribed us with benefits paid for by borrowed money, by money the government didn't have, money which we refused to give to the government through increased taxes. We are the ones who rejected any increase in taxation while voting for ever more benefits, and who refused to elect leaders who would scale back spending to what we were willing to pay for. We have a house of cards of our own making which is poised to fall at any time. Adding God to the recipe of judgment is only apt to hasten the fall and increase its intensity, because God truly has serious issues with us, including the church, which as a whole has refused to repent in any meaningful way.

I have no idea when judgment will come, though if we make it through the end of this month with its final blood moons and the Shemitah, I will be surprised. Still, when we read Jeremiah and Ezekiel about the destruction of Jerusalem and captivity of Israel that they prophesied, we see that God delayed the final judgment a long time, so much so that those prophets were widely regarded as false prophets and fear mongers. God's timing is unpredictable, and most of the modern day prophets who have tried to do so have failed miserably (I won't mention any names!).