I could send it now....
Posted on 02/26/2007 7:51:36 PM PST by chasio649
Thatcher warned of the Nanny State.
This country needs a leader of her calibre.
Fred is my favorite. I discovered him when someone posted him here back in the 1990's I've been hooked ever since.
That said, he is no lover of Bush or the War. I guess we can't agree on everything...
Some things i do agree with him on about Bush....it pained me to read some of his articles and i was mad at him for a while.....but some of the things he said has come to pass and i find it harder to argue with him on some issues....some people mistake him for being a lib...they are wrong.
I disagree with the basic premise of this article. It is completely overwrought.
Are we different people today than we were in 1850? Yeah. Absolutely.
But people worked their asses off to be able to have someone work on our car...to not have to break our backs with manual labor...to have a roof over our heads, heating and flushing toilets.
We don't have entire families of eight people living in a one room 18 x 18 log cabin with packed earth for a floor and a hole in the ground to store our perishable items in.
We don't have to mourn the loss of five kids (our our entire family) to disease, our wife to childbirth, and our husbands to broken bodies due to physical labor before they die of old age at the age of 40.
We gave all that up for technology and effort saving machinery.
This guy thinks it was great to have your entire family working dawn to dusk, eating sparse meals when they could get them in hard times, and shivering at night under a threadbare blanket with the warmth of your children and wife to keep you warm.
We still have what it takes...our men in the Middle East prove that to us. We just don't need to prove it in the general population.
The way I put this is that Anglo-Saxons have made a fetish of the rule of law.
Now, there really is another model to this, and I am going to tell you what it is.
Imagine a system in which privacy were a fundamental right, like a Constitutional right. Thus, you may be sitting out on your porch where people can see you, but if they snap a picture of you in your private life, that's an invasion of your privacy. Likewise if they collect information on you in databases.
In such a system, there could be no question whatever of publishing peoples' tax returns if you get ahold of them. Even in court cases, you could not demand the other person's papers as part of "discovery". That would be an invasion of privacy, and the law would PRIVILEGE privacy over other things, including the ability of those who might want to sue to gather evidence.
Now, the government might surveil for terrorists, but other aspects of privacy, such as, say, demanding Presidents answer questions, under oath, about sexual affairs, would be verboten. The law would hold individual privacy superior to the ability to pursue lawsuits. Of course this would lead to a higher degree of extramarital affairs and tax evasion than in the United States - a strong right of privacy which primed investigatory authority would make strict governance much more difficult.
Under such a regime, private property, especially the home, would be practically sacrosanct. It would be easier, probably, to have contraband because the police would be very, very constrained about when they could come in and what they could do. Simple probable cause will not do. The police must always go to a judge.
National security concerns would prime privacy, but law enforcement would be strictly segregated from and lesser than national security. Thus, to find TERRORISTS they might tap everybody's phone, but if, in the process, they find a prostitution ring or ten and a bunch of drug smugglers, that's not going to be prosecuted by the intelligence services, because what they are doing - listening in to discover TERRORISM - is technically illegal. Saving lives from bombs trumps the law, but only that. Regular law enforcement is not superior to privacy rights.
Of course, under such a regime of private property rights and mini-home-castles, Kelo-style eminent domain would be quite impossible. The downside would be that a little old lady in an old shack could, if she were stubborn, bollix up the building of a new shopping mall forever. She couldn't stop an AIRPORT, because that's truly governmental, but confiscation for PRIVATE use? Unheard of!
Another piece of this privacy-respecting system would be a greater degree of personal security in employment than is enjoyed in America. In America, you are your employer's property. If he doesn't like what you do in your spare time (so long as it's not a "protected right", like gay sex), he can fire you. But under this alternate system, the employer has no right to interfere with your private life, and indeed can only fire you for fault, and not his subjective standard of failure to perform either, but am indpendent legal standard, with labor courts to adjudicate wrongful discharge. "Employment at will" would not exist. Indeed, in a reversal of employee dependence on employer, the employee would be secure in his job unless he were deliberately insubordinate or grossly incompetent. And it would be an assault of private life for the employer to read the employee's e-mails even sent from work. Obviously there would be problems from this, including a difficulty in supervision, but certainly the personal liberty of the individual would be much more strongly protected.
Such a system would be practically the mirror opposite of ours.
And that is why the French and the Americans have such a great deal of difficulty understanding each other. I described for you France. That is the structure of France, with the peculiar legal preference for PRIVACY, to the detriment of everything else.
The American system is more economically efficient because people are under much closer supervision and far tighter legal and employer control than in France. French people are a lot freer, precisely because the rules of society are structured with a strong prejudice in favor of personal privacy, prohibition of clandestine intrusion (it's illegal) and job security making one far less beholden to an employer's good graces (although still subject to employers' authority: insubordination will still get you fired in Paris).
Two systems, two very different approaches. Mirror opposites in many ways. America is far less free and THEREFORE far more efficient. France is far freer in private life, and THEREFORE far less efficient. The closer men are reduced to being standardized machines following standard rules and subject to monitoring, the more raw output can be extracted from them. The more personal liberty and privacy (which, in a surveillance culture, amounts to the same thing) that men carve out for themselves, the greater diversity of conduct (and the greater indulgence in personal sin) they engage in. This makes them more independent, but less productive for that very reason: they are more difficult to steer.
Which is better? It depends on the relative values one places on productivity, money, privacy and individual freedom of action.
I should stress that I do not disagree with many of the points this author makes...I just disagree with the basic premise that we cannot produce men and women who can take advantage of living in this republic and make our country prosperous in this world.
It depends on the relative values one places on productivity, money, privacy and individual freedom of action.
I think there will always be those kind of men and women in this country...they are the ones that volunteer....including my stepson in Ramadi at the moment.
While i may have a few people read this post....i don't get on FR everyday...has there been a thread that talks about FOX News as of late....i tried to watch some of it the weekend to catch up on news...it has become pathetic in my opinion...what is going on at that network? Am i the only one to make this statement?
And I think all those men and women who served over there under very difficult circumstances, are going to come back and make something of themselves in civilian life if they do not make a career out of the service.
Including your stepson! Godspeed.
I didn't see any emphasis on nostalgia in the article. He didn't seem to be singing "The Way We Were", just stating how things are and an opinion as to why.
He speaks about the farmer in 1850 who was "free"...sure he was freer in some ways, but he was a slave in others. And you better believe he was a slave in a lot of ways such as getting food in his mouth and keeping his family alive.
Then why has almost every truly significant technological innovation of the last 50 years come from the Anglo-Saxon countries if 'men are reduced to standardized machines' here? Why are the world's top 20 universities in the US and UK (except for one in Japan?). And speaking of freedom, I tought the French have specifically made certain forms of speech illegal? What about gun ownership? Do they need licences?
The French do some things right, like their health care system, but in many ways their approch to life, avoidance of risk-taking and seek for 'pleasure' over anything else, does not move the world forward.
A great strength of the English-speaking peoples is their reliance on self-organization and the free market. To look at one example, the British or the Americans have never attempted to regulate and standardize the development of the English language the same way the French try to do even today. The result is that English adapts, with great success and acceptance, to people and changing societies, not the other way around.
The "National Character" is pathetic, hip-hoppers and gangster thugs are the biggest sellers in "music" and set the tone for much of popular culture.
More people can identify a picture of Kevin Federline than Dick Cheney, and these people vote, democrat of course.
Oh please!
In France, every person is required to carry a National Identity Card on their person at all times.
One can be stopped anywhere anytime and be required to produce the card.
One can be stopped and searched anywhere any time for no reason whatsoever. It happened to me many, many times in the years I lived in Paris.
France can turn into a Police State overnight, with the CRS ,armed with machine guns, on every street corner.
No 4th Amendment , no Due Process.
You may call it a "fetish", we call it FREEDOM.
Great post. Not to mention the Nobel Prizes. Which country wins the most in Science, medicine, Physics etc? Is it Socialist France ? No. It is the USA.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.