Come for the Politics, Stay for the Pathologies



Monday, June 28, 2010

Entitlement: The Road to Serfdom

I snagged this quote from Vanderleun’s Sidelines, where you always find odd and interesting things that may be either pointless or purposeful. This one falls in the purposeful bucket, as it may assist you in thinking through where the country is headed and whether you want to vote to continue the trajectory next time around :

It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.” -- by P.J. O'Rourke

No doubt if you understand this you already know it to be true anyway, so never mind. But need I remind you that P.J. O’Rourke wrote the most brilliant treatise on economics ever?

eat-the-rich-a-treatise-on-economics

If I do, you should get it. Far more entertaining than either Keynes or Hayek, and no math. Do you really ever need to read another summer beach novel anyway?

But if that’s not your cup of tea, I understand Amazon’s deeply discounting An Inconvenient Truth. sigh