I have been reading the notes from the quasi-constitutional convention that was held at the request of Virgina in February 1861 against the backdrop of an insolvent government, a severe recession, and political mayhem playing out across the South. Many at that convention agreed that giving Virginia what she wanted to calm the situation was the best thing to do for the short run. One delegate from New York who was representing the NY Chamber of Commerce was no exception and expressed the desire to do so for the sake of economic stability.

Among some of the delegates who were hesitant, their opinions were mixed between some central themes. 1) They didn’t like being threatened, and did not feel that as long as the South was arming itself and threatening war it was a good basis on which to compromise. 2) They felt politics had well accommodated Southern interests, considering the basis of the Ordinance of 1787, and that amending the constitution was unnecessary. 3) They felt they had been dragged far enough regarding the expansion of slavery and were not willing to concede more.

Of course the situation for them was different. They weren’t dealing with a president coming into office who was unfavorable to them. From the perspective of the South, however, it looked much different. Virginia was asking for constitutional guarantees for slavery interests precisely because they did not trust the incoming administration to protect them.

I do not know at what point we say we’ve been dragged far enough by the left, and that we aren’t willing to go farther. It will have consequences with it, as it did back then, of which I am well aware. But it has to happen at some point because we know exactly where we will end up if it isn’t stopped. And I don’t mean stopped in progression, I mean rolled back. To me, Romney seems more like a compromise candidate, which is an indication that people like me who feel that we’ve been dragged far enough are in the minority. But compromise of that sort will only serve to temporarily arrest the very real and eventual economic reality of the kind of state we have been building over the last 100 years, at best.

I need to insert a bit a of a disclaimer that I have been hit hard by this monster recession. I have managed little more than holding on by the skin of my teeth. And so I have a very acute awareness of the personal damage caused by sticking our heads in the sand and letting big government central planning go on by. I have already lost most of my nest egg, having to use it to survive, and I have nowhere to go but up. It seems far more attractive at first blush to get some relief from this deplorable condition of things, and I have been osculating between the temptation, but I have to be able to reason that as soon as I get on my feet and back to where I was that it isn’t going to just be flushed again because we didn’t go far enough, because we set ourselves up for another illusion of economic security that was patched together only to crumble to pieces in less than a decade.

If I am just going to lose it all again, it isn’t worth the illusion. I’m not interested in illusion; I am too old for it and do not have time to keep going around on the squirrel cage. And I don’t have a warm fuzzy that that is not what is being offered, and in that sense putting off the inevitable is just that.