I forget what blog posted these comments, but they sure are good, and sure make you go "hmmm" when you see who said them and how long ago they must have said them:
“The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within…They come from a peculiar type of brainy people, always found in our country, who if they add something to our culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.”
- Winston Churchill, on Leftists
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
- C. S. Lewis
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This ties in well to Tocqueville's famous chapter in "Democracy in America" that I have read quoted in several book I have read, mostly by Friedrich Hayek. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm
ReplyDelete"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? "
If it establishes itself in America, the parental-tyranny is what tyranny of the future will look like.