Anarchy: It’s not just for the downtrodden!

Life imitates art

A Multi-bajillionaire Pink Floyd scion desecrated a British war memorial as part of the selfish rants going on in Britain over the government’s austerity programs. This stunt could only have been improved upon by a live soundtrack of uber rich old dude Steven Tyler belting out “Eat the Rich.”

During the most recent—on the day of the tuition bill vote—they drew graffiti on a statue of Churchill and urinated on its base, damaged the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square, and then attacked the royal car. One protester—the adopted son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, as it happens—climbed the Cenotaph, London's central war memorial (inscribed "To the Glorious Dead"), swung from a flag that hangs from the top, and then tried to start a bonfire outside a courthouse for good measure. (Slate – Anne Applebaum)

The anarcho-trustfunders can retreat to their posh estates after a day of sticking it to the man, but the poor remain trapped among the rubble they’ve created. Ask the people of South Central LA.

What to do about the poor?
“Give them a job!” I shout at the rich liberal hand wringers. Education too expensive? Then open your wallets and start handing out money, you liberal millionaires! These faux generosi then protest that its government’s job. Oh yeah? Says who?  I don't remember reading that in the US Constitution.  And by the way, where does this omnipotent government get its money? Uncle Obama’s stash is emptier than Al Gore’s lock box.

The rich will then protest that they don’t have enough to hand out to everyone that needs it. They sigh dejectedly as they climb into the Lambourghini, shrugging their shoulders at the unfairness of it all as their tail lights fade in the distance.


Meanwhile, the Bill Gates’s of the world start with a small amount of money and a good idea, add a lot of hard work, and end up providing jobs for millions who want to work and take care of themselves.  Many become millionaires themselves.  Gates and people like him are now funding whole schools and food and medicine programs for entire countries.

Capitalism works. Statism doesn't.  Just ask the British protesters.

A Day That Will Live in Infamy

Frenchman crying - June, 1940 
He cries as he watches the German soldiers marching down the Champs Elysees. The glory of France has been ground underfoot by Hitler's goose-stepping legions. In a matter of weeks, the vaunted French army, the Maginot Line, and all of France's pride has been destroyed by the Nazi blitzkrieg. He is a middle-aged man, maybe in his mid Forties. Look at his tears, his tie, his nice suit. He survived World War One and looks like he has since prospered. And now? The night has fallen over France, and soon, all of Europe. He cries for the Twentieth Century. 
(Picture and caption: http://www.acepilots.com)


Lessons from a Museum
My wife and I took our kids to a museum here in town on December 7th a few years ago. While there, we had the good fortune to meet a WW II Navy veteran who had survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We also encountered the famous WW II picture of the Frenchman crying. These two contrasting encounters taught my family a lesson that I want to share with you.

At the beginning of our tour I spied the aging sailor wearing a veteran’s garrison cap emblazoned with the words “Pearl Harbor Survivor.” I crouched down and quickly tutored my children on Pearl Harbor, WW II, and the man’s significance upon that historical landscape. Fortunately, the kids grasped the meaning of the moment and we approached the gentleman. A mellow, unassuming man, he treated our questions with kindness and received our thanks with humility.

At the end of our museum tour we came face to face with the elderly veteran’s polar opposite: the picture of the Frenchman crying. Many of my fellow Americans would probably enjoy hearty anti-French belly laughs at this picture. But I feel only a profound, heart-tugging sadness when I gaze upon that pitiable countenance. This is the face of a people who lacked the will to defend their freedom. This is the face that traded war and its attendant violence for subjugation and humiliation.

I felt just as compelled to introduce my children to the Frenchman crying as I did to the aging hero. I directed my kids’ attention to the picture and asked them to describe it. “He’s crying,” and “That man is sad,” were the answers I got. They could see his distress and wanted to know what had caused it.

I told them this is how you end up when you're unable or unwilling to fight for your freedom. I told them that if they were not prepared to risk their lives for their country, they had better be prepared to stand on the street crying as the conquerors march by. I insisted they study the picture some more, observe the pain on the man’s face, notice the tears running down his cheeks. “Remember that face,” I told them, “and may you never experience his misfortune.”

Reliance on Maginot Lines and international organizations provides a sense of security--up until the inevitable failure of such contrivances. Then, alas, it is back to blood and steel. Sadly, we are all too human after all.

The veteran and the Frenchman stand in stark contrast. Taken together, they remind us of two unyielding truths: The opposite of war is not necessarily peace, and freedom is never free.

Vote Democrat or Vote Liberty--You Can't Do Both

Hayek famously dedicated his book, "The Road to Serfdom" to "Socialists of all parties," and Republicans have earned every bit of criticism they get.  They have eagerly participated in the horrible progressive experiment of the last 100 years.  They say they've changed, and I'm willing to give them one more chance.  With the Democrats, we are guaranteed to continue our death spiral.

100 Years of Progressive Statism is Enough!

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in whichpeople were free to keep everything they earned, because there wasno income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with theirown money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. 

People were generally free to engage in occupations and professionswithout a license or permit. There were few federal economicregulations and regulatory agencies. 

No Social Security, Medicare,Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS.No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, andLabor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. 

Fewsystems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federalminimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based ongold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA.No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions.No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.  (Reason - Up from Serfdom)

We have made great strides since the 1880's, but government has grown into a leviathan, trampling the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendment in the process, while stretching out the Commerce and General Welfare clauses into a penumbra so large they block the sun.

The federal government doesn't care more about your state than you and your fellow residents do.

The federal government does not care more about your kids, their education, their souls and their futures than you do.

No government can order your life better than you.  No government cares more about your life, liberty, family and property than you, and no police force is in a better position to defend them from immediate attack than you are.

Freedom

You hear that word bandied about a lot lately, from left and right, and from the founding fathers to Mel Gibson in his final scene in Braveheart... FREEEEDOMMMM!

... We want our Big Macs and Cardiac Catheterization too...

Negative Liberty

Many "freedoms" are documented in our Constitution, specifically in The Bill of Rights: freedom of religion,speech, the press, assembly, petition, the right to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. These "freedoms" are clearly documented limitations on the ability of government to interfere with the individual; they are political freedoms protecting the sovereignty of the individual from coercion by the state. The freedoms in the Constitution are termed "negative liberties" or the freedom from restraint. These freedoms are somewhat unique in that once they are possessed they are generally retained at little to no cost. Defending them may have significant cost, but the freedom of religion in and of itself costs us practically nothing.

Po$itive Liberty

Lately on the left you have been hearing a lot about freedom and rights; freedom from poverty (housing, clothing, transportation, possessions?), freedom from illness (right to medical care), freedom from starvation (right to food). These freedoms are termed "positive liberties", and generally involve power. The power to achieve self-realization or the ability to fulfill one's potential. Positive liberty is often described as the ability or entitlement to achieve one's ends, while negative liberty is described as the freedom from being forcibly prevented from achieving those ends. Positive liberties generally come at a significant monetary cost to society at large, in that the group must pay for the individual.

The distinction between positive and negative liberty is perhaps the clearest distinction between social liberals on the left and classical liberals on the right. The minimalist government established by our founding fathers was one of negative liberty. Government was seen as a necessary evil and established within a framework of checks and balances designed to enforce its restrictions and limit its actions. The governments of FDR's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society were ones of positive liberty, a paternalistic government whose main objective was in taking care of its members.

The Freedom to Fail

As stated previously, negative liberties come with little monetary cost, they do however have a cost. The primary cost of negative liberty is tightly bound to the freedom it provides, and that is the freedom to fail. Negative liberty is a liberty of non-interference, you can, to steal from the Army, "Be all that you can be", but the flip side of that coin is you can be an abject and miserable failure as well. You can choose not to purchase medical insurance, you can take that money and invest it or spend it, but if you contract cancer or heart disease you will suffer the consequences of your freedom of action. If you used the money to buy a boat, or frittered it away on entertainment, you are going to die. If you had to spend it on food, that is also part of the consequences of the freedom to fail.

We seem to have become a very, very risk averse nation... or more precisely, consequence averse. We want the freedom to do whatever we want, but we want the safety net that prevents us from dying of AIDS in a culvert due to the choices that we have made; we want our Big Macs and our cardiac catheterization too. We also tend not to want to sacrifice the luxury SUV in order to pay for the medical insurance of the seven kids we've had.

What are you willing to pay?

We seem to be trending more and more towards positive liberties, but the price of positive liberty is our negative liberties, the freedom of interference in our lives by the state. Isaiah Berlin noted in "Two Concepts of Liberty" that the danger of the pursuit of positive liberty was the danger that a paternalistic state can force upon its people a certain way of life, because the state deems that way to be the rationale course of action and is what the people should desire, whether they desire it or not.

There is a lot of paternalistic state being bandied about lately, from the government mandating that you purchase health insurance to the government proposing to regulate the amount of salt that is allowed to be in your food. Is it that far a stretch to the government regulating the number of calories allowed to be in your meal? What with the "nationwide obesity epidemic"? Each positive liberty comes at the cost of the erosion of our negative liberties, comes with the cost of more and more government interference in every aspect of our lives.

Grow Up!

Paternalism is hard to argue against, each paternalistic action in and of itself is predominately good, is made with ostensibly the best of intentions. Your parents after all were, or should have been, paternalistic: "Don't touch that, it's hot", "don't eat all those jellybeans, you'll get sick", "don't stay out past ten, you won't be able to get up for school in the morning". Unless you are a sociopath you are socially, culturally, and biologically conditioned to be paternalistic. The problem is we are also conditioned to resist that paternalism at a certain point, we grow up, we rebel against mommy and daddy and their rules, move out, and make our own way in the world.

So you need to think, and ask yourself, what kind of parents do you want? Do you want parents that respect your growth and maturation, that give you the freedom to be yourself, that give you the freedom to make bad choices, fail, and learn from them? Or do you want mommy telling you to put your coat on when you go outside when you are 42? Or telling you not to put so much salt on your food at your 20th wedding anniversary?

What kind of government do you really want? Think about it!

The Sons of Liberty

As long as we are resurrecting flags of the Revolutionary War such as the Gadsen (Don't Tread On Me) Flag, the flag pictured above is the flag of "The Sons of Liberty" also known as the rebellious stripes flag and is believed to have been created by Samuel Adams in 1767 for the Stamp Act Rebellion. It is considered by some to be the first flag of the American Revolution.

~Finntann~