The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
(Y)ou can’t depend on the government because the government is not some brooding presence in the sky. The government is an organization with its own interest which it will serve over and above whatever interest it is supposedly being set up to serve. — Thomas Sowell, interviewed at Right Wing News
Correspondingly, Shepherd Book from Firefly, “War Stories” –
A government is a body of people, usually, notably ungoverned.
Adherents of the unconstrained vision are idealists, those who believe in Utopia, or Heaven on earth. Unfortunately, their attempts to create these Heavens on earth have always led to Hells, and always will. The reason? Believing human nature is perfectible, they must always project all evil onto other people, who must be sacrificed in order to leave only the “good.” The term for this is “scapegoating,” and as M. Scott Peck clearly noted, it is “the genesis of human evil.”
If I had to describe the left (those who believe in the unconstrained vision) in three phrases, it would be the “lust to destroy,” the “lust for power,” and the “lust for attention.” Those three traits, in the West, are the main ones of Satan, who wanted to be God. His sin was that of hubris, as it is the main sin of the left.
As I noted, these divisions exist even among libertarians. Objectivism, for example, is strongly leftist, with its belief in a minuscule group of intellectually and morally superior people who have the right to rule over a destroyed world. Since Objectivists are idealists who believe in a perfect Galtian Utopia, those who do not are in their minds not merely mistaken, but evil.
—
The Constrained and Unconstrained Visions, Bob Wallace, The Price of Liberty
Interesting essay.
Remember this one as you go to the polls tomorrow:
Leftists perpetuate hopelessness while conservatives are optimists. If you believe that you have no hope of making the most of yourself and building a prosperous life, then the hopelessness of Leftism makes sense to you and you believe that money comes from luck and/or exploitation and you can only get it by taking it from those who are making it. In contrast, fiscal conservatism is about optimism in the individual’s ability to create wealth and the recognition that the system that allows individuals to keep the majority of the wealth they create harnesses one of the greatest powers in the universe: human ambition.
Cynthia Yockey, A Newly Conservative Lesbian – The economic theory of Leftist hopelessness vs. conservative optimism
Do read the whole piece. It’s quite good.
From the comments to my post, Rope, Trees, Some Assembly Required from March of last year, another QotD by reader Moshe Ben-David:
It’s one thing to live among a populace that sees someone across an ocean as your enemy, it’s another thing entirely to know that there’s a 50% chance that every person you see day to day would be more than happy to use the government to crush you and take your stuff and give it to them, and are too damned stupid to realize that such action will eventually crush them as well.
—
November of 2010 will be the final proving ground.
I’m not so sure about that last. One data point doesn’t necessarily indicate a trend. It can hint at one, or more or less fit the current curve. One would be cause for – dare I say – hope, the other would crush it.
I’m expecting November to be a mediocre helping of “meh,” but that’s better than “damn the torpedos, FULL SPEED AHEAD!” Right now, eternal gridlock looks to be the best we can hope for.
And saying that’s a good thing tells you how deep in the sh!t we really are.
Today’s QotD is an entire post from Instapundit:
RATTNER: Our Leaders Are Not Truthful About The Deficit. Of course not. If people really understood what they’ve done to us, they’d all be hanging from lampposts.
You know, the hangman’s noose is a remarkably simple thing to make . . .
In the comments to Saturday’s QotD, reader Crotalus left this:
Come to think of it, our Constitution is a restraining order as well, and those in power treat it the same way that common criminals treat standard restraining orders.
I hadn’t really thought about it in just that way before, but he’s right. The purpose of a constitution in a Constitutional Republic is as a restraint on the powers of government, and since power corrupts and attracts the corrupt, pretty much all it takes is time and entropy for those restraints to be overcome, bypassed, and finally ignored. Now we have 545 people who each swear an oath to uphold and defend that piece of paper before they assume their offices, and by all appearances well over half either haven’t read it, or are deliberate liars. Or both.
And I’m not sure about the rest of them.
What this is all leading up to is I’m sick to death of all of it. I’m sick of not being able to trust a damned word that comes out of the major media; I’m sick of not being able to trust that LE officers will follow the damned law themselves; I’m sick at the knowledge that a lot of people in uniform will just follow their orders even when they know they’re wrong; and I’m very deep-down-in-my-soul sick of corrupt, lying, condescending politicians. And I’m very very sick at heart that none of us can afford to NOT watch them and listen to all this and yell about it to make sure others know. Because we don’t know when it might be some little bit of knowledge-spreading by someone out there that lights enough of a fire to keep something from going over the edge.
— Firehand, Irons in the Fire
Can I get an “AMEN!”?
P.J. O’Rourke from his Weekly Standard column They Hate Our Guts (And They’re Drunk on Power):
This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order.
And we all know what restraining orders are, don’t we?
(h/t: Instapundit – like he needs another link.)
From the National Review Online column by Mark Krikorian, “A Network of Small Complicated Rules, Minute and Uniform” from October 1:
The federal government bans the incandescent light bulb. It bans street signs that have all capital letters and mandates what font they need to be in. Now, Congress has seen fit to focus its august attention on the volume of TV commercials.
The problem is not that these things create unnecessary costs or destroy jobs, which they do, or that lawmakers have more important things to do, which is also true. Rather, the federal government has no business doing any of these things. Yes, the entitlements trainwreck is a bigger issue, but if we, as a people, continue to shrug at this sort of thing, our unfitness for self-government will become undeniable.
It still amazes me that Tocqueville foresaw this soft despotism so long ago:
It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
That’s about 2/3rds of the whole piece, but it’s the QotD.
I’m amazed at the prescience of de Tocqueville, but given the predictability of human nature, maybe I shouldn’t be.