“By… extravagancies, the genteel are reduced to poverty, and forced to borrow of those whom they formerly despised.” (Benjamin Franklin - the Way to Wealth)

I’ve approached banks to “bail me out” of my financial folly. They snubbed me. Yet the tables have turned, and we’re expected to accommodate them gladly. I say, “Your credit history is atrocious – application denied.”

But, we’re assured, if we were to let them go down, the nation’s economy goes down with them. To counter that, I defer again to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote:

“There seems to be in every nation a greater proportion of industry and frugality, which tend to enrich, than of idleness and prodigality, which occasion to poverty, so that upon the whole there is a continual accumulation. Reflect what Spain, Gaul, Germany and Britain were in the time of the Romans, inhabited by people little richer than our savages, and consider the wealth they at present possess… and all this notwithstanding their bad, wasteful, plundering governments, and their mad destructive wars; and yet luxury and extravagant living has never suffered much restraint in those countries.”

Sound familiar? And as though he were preaching from a modern super-store, Franklin continues:

“If the importation of foreign luxuries could ruin a people, we should probably have been ruined long ago: For the British nation claimed a right, and practiced it, of importing among us not only the superfluities of their own production, but those of every nation under heaven; we bought and consumed them, and yet we flourished and grew rich.”

(The Internal State of America – 1786)

In other words, he says that Westerners are inherently productive and resourceful, and history shows that no stupidity, tyranny, or imported goods have been able to suppress that.

On the individual plane, self-made millionaires universally agree that fortune is the product of spending less than you make. That’s how we “muddle through the pinch.”

I’ve spent the majority of my life in the pinch. In times when spending less than we make is logistically impossible, the best advice is found on our currency: “In God We Trust,” for “with God, all things are possible.”

I offer this advice from experience.

Mike VanOuse

Lafayette