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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss stock derivatives, the Flash Crash and the failing financial status of USA Inc.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Report from the Joint CFTC-SEC Advisory Committee on Emerging Regulatory Issues
Mary Meeker’s look at USA Inc.
USA Inc.: A Basic Summary of America’s Financial Statements
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On March 23rd, 1775 in Virginia, the largest colony in America at that time, a meeting of the colony’s delegates was held in St. John’s Church in Richmond to vote on resolutions of defense for the colony as the war with England loomed and on its participation should war break out.

Patrick Henry, before a vote was taken on resolutions he presented in support of joining the other colonies in a war for freedom, spoke without any notes in a voice that became louder and louder, climaxing with the now famous ending,

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Have we come so far from those words and the meaning of liberty itself, that we are now a nation of people who would accept chains in return for a government providing for our every need?  Are we a people who would give up our principles and perhaps most of our own sovereignty in exchange for peace defined as not having to take any individual action or responsibility?

We are burdened with crushing debt and even heavier unfunded liabilities necessary to support an expanding central government that is attempting to control every aspect of the lives of the American people.  Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, the environment, health care and business regulation are not found in the Constitution as powers of our central government.  However, liberal interpretation – false interpretation if one reads the Federalist Papers – of the Commerce Clause and the Social Welfare Clause of the Constitution opened a back door for the central government to assume powers well beyond the seventeen outlined in the enumerated powers specifically granted therein.  Each time a new power was taken, it was in return for some form of entitlement or relief from self-reliance.  It has reached a point today where it is difficult to distinguish who has the greater hand, the central government or the people.

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If you are under 30, you really need to read this column and pass it on to your friends.  Your elected officials are dooming you to a new sort of bondage, a form of 21^st Century slavery, if you will.

First, some background.

On October 16, 1854, Abraham Lincoln, then a former one-term Congressman, gave a three hour speech in Peoria, Illinois in which he decried the extension of slavery into the territories.  The Republican Party was barely three months old.  Lincoln warned that slavery was a “monstrous injustice” based on the raw principle of “self-interest” at odds with the “fundamental principles of civil liberty.”

Lincoln was moved to action by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, widely seen as a check on the growth of slavery in the territories.

At Peoria, Lincoln presented the economic, legal and moral case against slavery.

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