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A BTT for the afternoon crowd.

As in my previous comment, it’s a poor analogy. Europe’s problems stemmed from the desire of men to lord it over others. The saddest part is that so many of them seem to take pleasure in being lorded over.

It isn’t a supposed spirit or enlightenment that distinguishes successful people from losers. It’s the knowledge that they can tolerate privations and that they can produce what they need without interference from others. Colonists were resourceful people in a nation of ample resources. They either traveled to America or their families traveled in recent memory. The trip was a life or death struggle which ended in a forest where a second life or death struggle began.

They fought off the natives and the French. They built cities and comfortable lives for themselves in places that previously supported hunter-gatherers. It must have been something to look at a wild forest and know that if you could till the land, you could have it. It led to the inexorable question among colonists who regarded England’s attempts at control with the question, “What do we need you for?”

Over time, this belief transported to the west, to California, and to Alaska and Hawaii, even to The Philippines. For two centuries it served as the base to keep busybodies in check - “I don’t need you to tell me what to do.” It was the thesis for Atlas Shrugged. Many of Europe’s greatest failures spring not from the wellhead of men who insisted, “You do need us to tell you what to do,” but from the fools who believed them. The most common question about National Socialism and Soviet Communism is, “Why did they let them do it?” In part, it was because the many were disarmed by the few, but it was the many who allowed that to happen.