Fear often the catalyst for bad policy

Madison County Record ^ | 11 Oct. 2017 | Bob Ballinger District 97 Representative

[fella]

As Americans, we see tragedy and attacks and ask the question, how do we prevent it from ever happening again? We seek solutions. We want to feel like we are doing something about it. It is a natural response by an industrious people. Asking questions after a tragedy and starting conversations about solutions can be productive, but allowing ourselves to be swept away by fear can have lasting negative consequences and very likely will yield few benefits.

Historically in America, nearly every loss of liberty we once possessed was exchanged for a perceived gain in “safety.”  Said exchange is almost always motivated by fear that stems from some crisis we faced or experienced as a people, often, resulting in little to no real gains in safety and producing a real degradation in liberty. But for some, they feel like they are doing something.

[fella]

Historically in America, nearly every loss of liberty we once possessed was exchanged for a perceived gain in “safety.”

What I like to call "The Stampede to Bad Law Effect" that the media, Rats, RINOs and progressives of all stripes love so much.

[Secret Agent Man]

Women voting and Prohibition being the easy two examples.

[loveliberty2]

Excerpted words from Dr. Russell Kirk's The Rarity of the God-fearing Man:

Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. It ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." - "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man" - Russell Kirk.