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| Young Men Want to Fight for the Tribe | Hugo Chavez: What's the Point? |
Wake Me When It's Over
by Christopher Chantrill
November 08, 2005 at 3:18 am
WE LIVE, MOST of us, most of the time, in a dream. So says John Derbyshire as he thinks about the aftermath of the riots in France. Even as the dream of the welfare state is turning into a nightmare there are people running around with tee-shirts exhorting us to MAKE POVERTY HISTORY
by dint of "fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing additional resources for basic needs — education, health, clean water, food, and care for orphans." Good grief! How come nobody ever thought of this before? Billions of poor people out there, and all we have to do is direct some additional resources! It’s so simple! Yet for decades we’ve been doing nothing! Shame, shame, shame on us!
In the British Guardian the edit page invokes the Kerner Commission as though we had learned nothing from the generation since the 1960s. No doubt the Kerner generation correctly diagnosed the illness—“frustrated hopes and powerlessness.” But then they proposed a foolish remedy of more government spending and payments for not working that took a generation to unravel.
Derbyshire directs his readers to the BBC website where the children of the welfare state propose their solution to the French crisis. To them
the solution to the rioting in France is plain. Respect! Give them jobs! Set up some post-colonial studies programs! Work together! Socialism! Love! End poverty!
The children of the welfare state have been well taught. The educated elite has taught them to believe that their welfare state, their “social model,” is the way of goodness and truth. But the truth is that the welfare state is a cruel and oppressive system. It is not a social model but a feudal model that privileges the educated elite and reduces the rest of society to powerless adolescence, coopted and anesthetized with pensions and welfare, but deprived in independence and responsibility. It will take a generation to unlearn that, and in the meanwhile many people will suffer.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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