Exert intergenerational responsibility. In 1789 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison in which he argued that a federal bond should be repaid within one generation of the debt, because, as he put it, “The earth belongs . . . to the living . . . No man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeeded him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living.”
