The Doorbell. Something to ponder.

From the powerline blog:

Are we going to allow America to become Declinistan?

The United States is still different [from European states]. In the wake of economic meltdown, the decadent youth of France rioted over the most modest of proposals to increase the retirement age. Elderly “students” in Britain attacked the heir to the throne’s car over footling attempts to constrain bloated, wasteful and pointless “university” costs. Everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria angry mobs besieged their parliaments demanding the same thing: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill and  your multitrillion dollar porkathons and just stay the hell out of my life and my pocket.

That’s the America that has a fighting chance – a nation that stands for economic dynamism, not the stagnant “managed capitalism” of France, for the freest, widest, rudest bruiting of ideas, not Canadian-style government regulation of approved opinion: for self-relience and the Second Amendment, not the security state in which Britons are second only to North Koreans in the number of times they’re photographed by government cameras in the course of going about their daily business. But when you hit the expressway to Declinistan there are few exit ramps. That America’s animating principles should require a defense at all is a melancholy reflection on how far we’ve already gone. Live free – or die from a thousand soothing caresses of nanny-state sirens.

Like I said, if you want a happy ending, it’s up to you.

Your call, America.

from After America: Get Ready for Armageddon by Mark Steyn

Loosing our rights and freedom of choice

A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of a what a particular group thinks it ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.  Milton Friedman

And this is the problem in our country now. We have a ruling class that thinks we “ought to want” toxic, curly fry light bulbs, for instance. (I wish I’d thought of that mercury light bulb description first, but credit goes to Mark Steyn.)  How dare we want to buy what we want? How could we possibly know what’s best for us or what we can afford or what we want to afford? We aren’t smart enough to choose for ourselves. All options are taken away for the greater good, because they know what the greater good is. Only they know what’s best for you and me.

They are attempting to take away our freedom of choice – unless it’s the life of an unborn baby, and then everyone has that right to choose death over life. Isn’t it amazing how important choice is to these statists until it comes to the type of shower head in your bathroom or the kind of car you drive?

It’s nothing more than a total disdain for everyone’s freedom but their own. And the only individuals they respect are themselves.

 

 

A nation of peasants? – Victor Davis Hanson

Traditional peasant societies believe in only a limited good. The more your neighbor earns, the less someone else gets. Profits are seen as a sort of theft. They must be either hidden or redistributed. Envy rather than admiration of success reigns.

In contrast, Western civilization began with a very different ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if left to his own talents and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better off.

Read entire article here.