“If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from … threat … by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind an Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.””
Address on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, Rendezvous with Destiny, October 27, 1964
This was not on China, it was on the Soviet Union. Nevertheless it seems quite fitting, doesn´t it? Morals don´t feed us, granted, but appeasement to tyrants and oppression makes slaves - not only in Tibet.
It was stupid to give the Olympic Games to China, stupid and immoral, but there is still time for us to back out. Boycott Bejing Olympics? Yeah!
China, free, tibet, Olympic, Games, Tibet
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may 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
tyranny, majority, do-gooders, busybody, busybody
Government: “it takes money from some people, keeps a bunch of it and gives the rest to other people.” (Dave Barry as cited in David Boaz´Libertarianism: A Primer).
These days I had a chance to see municipal government at work. A troup of communal workers trimmed a group of 4-5 trees outside the building where I work. The workers were five and that` s how the work was done: one of them watched the traffic, one watched two others who were busy watching cut-off branches and twigs fall to the ground, two were on a kind of elevator that lifted them up to where the actual work was done - one of these seemed to be responsible for the security and welfare of the last one who did the cutting with long electromechanical clipping devices. The two twig-falling watchers were not completely idle - they picked up the fallen twigs (I saw at least one of the do that) and carried them - a handful of twigs in ONE hand, the other one seemingly needed for holding the balance - to their pickup car which was parked a few hundred meters from the site of the action. They did have some breaks, eating, looking, phoning with a mobile telephone, discussing - the strategy? - it took two full workdays to have the 4-5 little trees trimmed. I had a - plausible - and dizzying vision of small working groups like this one at “work” all over the republic at the very same time
“…government enterprises are less efficient, less innovative, and more wasteful than private firms.” (ibidem)
No doubt, big government, as we have it today on every layer of public life is like an open vein wasting the life-blood of western societies.
municipal, authorities, waste, inefficiency, taxpayer, wastefulness, taxmoney, taxes
I took the lackmus test at The Advocates for Self-Government and this is the result:
I am not surprised by the result :-)
Try it out for yourself!
libertarian, conservative, individual, liberty, self-government
We hold these truths to be self-evident
