Enjoying the view from Limbo
There is all the difference in the world between describing certain beliefs or assumptions as “intolerable” or “unacceptable” as a point of rhetorical emphasis, and describing them this way as a matter of practical governmental policy, i.e., between strongly disapproving of someone’s thoughts and actively engaging the coercive power of the state to criminalize and punish those thoughts. Unless, that is, one happens...
Anyone who says, whether stridently or matter-of-factly, whether publicly or in your living room, that in order to solve this or that problem, “we have to come together globally to take the necessary actions,” is showing you, in no uncertain terms, that he has wittingly or unwittingly accepted the premise that it is both good and necessary for the entire human race to...
In my recent “Reflections On Independence,” I noted that modern man, as a mechanism of soft despotism, has gradually been convinced, or rather conveniently allowed himself to be convinced, to judge important decisions, particularly those regarding the wellbeing of society as a whole — the sort of decisions that once formed the very core of the republican idea of self-government — as being...
The blind leading the blindfolded.— We allow the state to decide for us, not because we believe the state knows what is best — practical results consistently prove beyond any doubt that the state does not know — but because we have been convinced that we do not know, and therefore that the easiest course of action is to leave the complex decisions,...
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