[Thane_Banquo]

What these two men describe is literally happening right before our eyes. First, the slow creep of de Tocqueville's quiet servitude, growing in the U.S. since the New Deal, and now the band of Chicago ruffians who have taken over our government and abandoned even the slightest pretense to the niceties of political discourse.

[freedumb2003]

Who knew she could write?

(/sophomoric and crass interlude)

[Jacquerie]

My favorite Hayek quote is, “ . . . the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration of the character of the people. This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.”

[denydenydeny]

What Tocqueville did not consider was how long such a government would remain in the hands of benevolent despots when it would be so much more easy for any group of ruffians to keep itself indefinitely in power by disregarding all the traditional decencies of political life.

This is the problem with liberalism. It assumes that the enormous mechanisms of governmental power that they wish to set up will remain in the hands of benevolent men. Liberalism regards the free behavior of men with suspicion, but government, as long as there is no religious component to it, gets a pass.

[Til I am the last man standing]

Don’t forget the comicbook version:

http://mises.org/books/trts/

[Hugin]

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the Plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader - the barbarians enter Rome.... Mine was a lovely world till the parasites took over.

Robert Heinlein

[Starboard]

Bump for later

[parisa]

De Toqueville is “Brave New World” to Hayek’s “1984”.

* * * * * *

From wiki (comparisons of George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

Also Christopher Hitchens on the two books:

We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression “You’re history” as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell’s was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley ... rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.[20]

[tophat9000]

So dead on to what we see know...

[riri]

bookmark for tomorrow readin’

[aSeattleConservative]

Can libertarianism and conservatism co-exist? What happens when (or more like “if”) the libertarian founded Tea Party movement (now backed by conservatives) win in the upcoming elections and throw the economic socialist bums out? Will the secular/atheist/agnostic libertarians abide by the Christian conservative social policies, or expect the Conservative movement to follow the Libertarian Party’s “If it feels good do it” social platform?

God plays no role in libertarianism, therefore it can’t be successful over a long term basis.

[SunkenCiv]

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