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The Cellar: a friendly neighborhood coffee shop, with no coffee and no shop. Established 1990.

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3/14/2021 10:37 pm  #1


Smarter than Bastiat

"Scott Galloway on recasting American individualism and institutions" is behind an Economist paywall.
But you can see much of it at https://roughlydaily.com/2021/03/14/nothing-turns-out-to-be-so-oppressive-and-unjust-as-a-feeble-government/

Some snippets...
"Yes, the private sector deftly turned publicly-funded technologies into commercial successes, and there was a place for individual genius in that. But those successes were also built on long hours by tens of thousands of engineers (many of them immigrants, many of whom went to public schools). The Ayn Rand image of the solo entrepreneur — Hank Reardon toiling alone in his laboratory to invent a new kind of steel — is a pernicious deception."
 
"Antipathy to government institutions is often called “conservatism,” but it bears no resemblance to any principled tradition by that name. Conservatism is rooted in a respect for institutions. Its intellectual founding father, Edmund Burke, wrote, “Nothing turns out to be so oppressive and unjust as a feeble government.” The observation comes from his most famous work, a criticism of the anti-institutional, pro-individualism of the French Revolution and the bloody terror that followed. There is plenty to criticise about the American administrative state, but idolatry of the individual is hardly a true “conservative” critique."
 
"What can be done to reverse the country’s self-destructive course, and to repair and prepare? America should use the pandemic as a turning point for renewal. Just as the human immune system develops antibodies from one viral infection to fight off another, Covid-19 presents us with the opportunity to build “societal antibodies” — practices to fend off the contagious disease of selfishness."

Don't get bogged down in 150 year old fiction as real as reality TV.


 Freedom is just another word for nothin' left to lose.
 
 

3/15/2021 6:16 am  #2


Re: Smarter than Bastiat

Nor can the current, degraded notion of freedom be found in the works of America’s founders. The premise of the Declaration of Independence is not simply that our rights are “self-evident” but that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.” This is to say, the founders respected “government” — they saw the state as a vehicle to guarantee freedom. In the years after the American Revolution, those who fought for liberty spent the rest of their lives progressively strengthening the central government they had formed in order to secure that freedom. Their legacy is the stability and prosperity we have come to take for granted. The exaggerated emphasis on individualism imperils their achievements.

I was struck by this while re-reading Undaunted Courage. Jefferson who is probably the most quoted President among anti-government folks probably did more to strengthen the US government than any other President. He knew when to flip from theory to reality.
 


If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you. - Louis Brandeis
 

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