Friday, March 31, 2006
ALL THE WORLD OVER IT'S SO EASY TO SEE
In the words of The Rascals and George W. Bush, people everywhere just want to be free. The point seems almost trivial: We want to be able to do what we want, and we don't want people stopping us.
But many events give me pause as I stand to mutter my Bushy cliches about the universal love of liberty. Here's one: Tens of thousands of people gather to mourn the death of their beloved dictator. One might think it difficult to regard the regime of Slobodan Milosevic -- featuring war, ethnic cleansing, rape camps and other hijinks -- with affectionate nostalgia. And yet, after his richly deserved croak, people were sobbing on the streets of Belgrade.
In St. Petersburg, a group of Russian communists renamed a scenic boulevard "Slobodan Milosevic Street." This made sense, as the Russian people responded to the chaotic Yeltsin administration with an explicit nostalgia for forced collectivization, one-party elections, hilarious show trials and the gulag. And now that they've got a good, strong leader in Vlad Putin, their desires are well on the way to realization.
Lest one think an enthusiasm for personal subordination is limited to the Slavs, let me assert that it is a universal feature of our admirable species. Indeed, since the development of the political state, human history is incomprehensible on any hypothesis other than that people hate and fear their freedom. On the hypothesis that everyone aspires to freedom, it is difficult to explain why we are continuously subordinated....
... We want the government to guarantee our health, deflect hurricanes, educate our children and license us to drive; we want to be told what to eat, what to smoke and whom to marry. We are justly proud of the fact that no enduring society has ever incarcerated more of its people. Noting that the policeman has a pistol, a club, a stun gun, a can of pepper spray and a database that includes us, we feel happy and secure.
Our submission is absolute: We want to be operated like puppets and provided for like pets.
The terrorists hate our freedom. But we should be comfortable with that. We hate our freedom, too.
The Fear of Freedom
...Advocates for liberty are increasingly facing a new challenge. Used to be that our main fight was against the ever expanding size and scope of government. But it's fast becoming the case that half the battle is convincing people that freedom is actually a good thing in the first place. People would rather have a massive government that makes all of their decisions for them, ostensibly because they'd rather have someone other than themselves to blame when they make the wrong decisions. Hence, the uncomfortable number of smokers who support smoking bans because they think it'll help them kick the habit.
Another outgrowth of fears of freedom are those trendy attacks on choice itself, where choice was once seen as an almost universal positive.
The phrase for this is parentalism (as opposed to paternalism), or the idea that grown adults are distubingly beginning to see the government as a parent, someone to watch over them, and guide their hand toward good decisions....
