Author Topic: "Give Me Liberty"  (Read 1415 times)

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Online Pandora

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"Give Me Liberty"
« on: July 10, 2014, 10:27:19 PM »
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.... In Des Moines, I listened while eight influential businessmen discussed facts.  Congress had abdicated.  The Federal executive power, by decree, was looting the banks; bankers were silent.  Political power, consolidated and unrestrained, was wrecking the American political structure.  Civil law no longer protected human rights.  They said, “There is no refuge.  We had the only protection for human rights on earth, and it is gone.  The world will go back to the Dark Ages.”

 I said, “How can you men know this, and do nothing?  Is this possible?  You know that our country is being destroyed, and you do nothing to save it?  You actually understand that your own property, your liberty, your lives, are in danger, and you do nothing?”

“That’s it,” they said.

It was a nightmare.  When I found anyone who understood the situation as I did, he had no hope, and pessimism itself is not American.  Americans hold the truths that all men are born equal and endowed by the Creator with inalienable liberty.  Freedom is the nature of man; every person is self-controlling and himself responsible for his thoughts, his speech, his acts.  That is a fact; we know it; Americans establishes this Republic upon that fact.  And to doubt that knowledge of any fact must dispel ignorance of that fact is to deny the plain reality of all human experience.  To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.

My friends said, “There’s no use, nothing can be done.  Americans don’t want liberty any more.”

The answer to that is, “Do you?  What are YOU doing to defend your liberty?”

They replied wearily, as Europeans do, “An individual is nothing.  You can’t resist history.”

“Resist history?” I said.  “You and I make history.  History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past.  Americans make history, and America is not dead.  There is the farmer in Kansas.”

“And what is he voting for?” they retorted.

That was a shallow view.  The issue is not one of party politics.  The issue at stake is the survival of American constitutional law, the American political structure.  This is a real political issue, and the major political parties have not represented a real political issue since the 1860s.  These parties have not stood for opposite political principles; they have differed only about methods.  For example: one has stood for higher tariffs; the other, for lower tariffs.  They have not presented to voters the real political issue between tariffs and free trade.

The two major parties have contended only for public office.  American politics, so-called, has been a professional sport, a matter of organization, team-play, and getting votes.  Elections have been sporting events, as baseball games are; and Americans, accurately, have regarded them as sport*.
*[“The Presidential campaign is at that quiet moment, after the whistle blows and before the ball goes zooming down the field.” - Raymond Moley in News-Week, September 11, 1944]

.... Will an American defend the Constitutional law that divides, restricts, limits and weakens political-police power, and thus protects every citizen’s personal freedom, his human rights, his exercise of those rights in a free, productive capitalist economy and a free society?

Or will he permit the political structure of these United States to be replaced by a socialist state, with its centralized, unrestricted police power regimenting individuals into classes, suppressing individual liberty, sacrificing human rights to an imagined “common good,” and substituting for civil laws the edicts, or “directives,” once accurately called tyranny and now called administrative law?*
*[I take this definition from Ludwig von Mises’ book, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, Yale University Press]

This is the choice that every American must make.  There is no escape from this choice; the present situation put it before us and requires a decision.

Every American is living today in the first political crisis he has ever known, and upon his decision and his action depend his right to own property, his exercise of his natural freedom, and the safety of his own life.  For nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar.  I am not an alarmist; that is plain fact.

The major political parties do not yet represent this political issue.

In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over.  The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.

The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle.  It does not stand for American individualism.  Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics.

Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles therefore have no means of peaceful political action.  A vote for the New Deal approves national socialism, but a vote for the Republican Party does not repudiate national socialism.

Defeating the New Deal at the polls might possibly check our country’s back-sliding, but it is not enough to set America on its forward way again.  The collectivist state was not invented in 1932.  The New Deal’s political principle comes from Plato through the Dark and Middle Ages to various developments by Machiavelli, Rousseau, Fourier, Hegel - who defines freedom as “submission to The State.”

... Today, Federal administrative agencies have nearly destroyed those divisions of the political power which alone protect the property, liberty and lives of American citizens.  Administrative political-police power cannot be divided, it cannot even be subject to civil law, because a state that dictates men’s actions in producing and distributing goods must have undivided and absolute power.

Congress can no longer be the law-maker, when many chiefs of departments and bureaus are daily issuing orders which the police enforce as if they were laws.

The States are invaded by swarms of Federal tax collectors and Federal agents dictating to citizens and gnawing away the last powers of the States, and the civil rights of the citizen must vanish as the self-ruling power of his community and his State is usurped by a centralized National power.

... No politician, yet, has asked American voters to give him the power to strip any State of the powers it has usurped from its citizens, nor to strip the Federal Government of the powers it has usurped from the States; to restore the rights of the citizens, the rights and powers of the States, and the political structure of this Union of States; nor to add to the original list of restrictions upon political power - the list known as the Bill of Rights - further restrictions that will adequately protect the property, liberty and lives of persons living in the modern world and make the United States again the world-champion of human rights and the leaders of the world-liberating revolution.

The Americans who already are undertaking this task, and will do it, are individuals - the individual who is called “nothing” and patronized as “the little man” in Germany, and as “the common man” here, the individual who makes and re-makes the world.

Long, long, long, long.  Well-worth reading every word, if only for the history.

A surprise included for those who click.

http://www.panarchy.org/lane/liberty.html

H/T American Digest
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

"Let us assume for the moment everything you say about me is true. That just makes your problem bigger, doesn't it?"

Offline AmericanPatriot

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #1 on: July 11, 2014, 02:13:09 AM »
Excellent!
Thanks for sharing

Offline IronDioPriest

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #2 on: July 11, 2014, 07:32:41 AM »
...A surprise included for those who click.

http://www.panarchy.org/lane/liberty.html

H/T American Digest

Very good! Surprise indeed!
"A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means."

- Thomas Jefferson

Offline Libertas

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #3 on: July 11, 2014, 08:47:40 AM »
Bee-swarm...libiots are ours!

They and their hive-mind are bringing us to ruin, their bureaucrats choke us with burdens and their masters lord over all with a capricious and self-agrandizing zeal...

These "reactionary psuedo-thinkers" have been at a long long time...

The psychotic thinking that it is "liberal"  to suppress liberty and "progressive" to stop free initiative and it is "economic freedom" that is used to obstruct all freedom and it is "economic equality" to make men slaves...this is all still being taught, promoted, celebrated and championed!

She quotes Jefferson - "Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God"...which Chicken/Egg thing...he got from Franklin, who used it in creating his Great Seal design - " "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God".

http://www.greatseal.com/committees/firstcomm/reverse.html

Here's to ending our current tyranny!!!   ::beertoast::

The sweep of history she covers is impressive, lot of reading between the lines filled in rapidly as anyone with a reading of history will immediately know her references.  A nice piece of Americana.  Interesting too how may back then in the early days of DemonRat socialism that, according to her numbers, only about 4m people were on "relief rolls" whereas today just this year for the first time ever we have more people receiving assistance of some form or another than are working!  And I note how they used the temporary term "relief" then as opposed to our permanent terms like "welfare" and "entitlements"!

We are truly doomed!  Thanks to liberals, progressives...reactionary psuedo-thinkers...Democrats.........tyrants!!!

The next reaction gonna sting!!!
 ;)
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Offline Weisshaupt

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #4 on: July 11, 2014, 10:31:21 AM »
Wow, that is like reading an abbreviated version of Sowell.

Spolier alert:

Here come the quote I found particularly insightful

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“It is too big - he said - too big.  At the top, it is too small.  It will not work.  In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God.  A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head.  No.  Only God can know Russia.”

Socialism only works in small, voluntary groups in which each member is kept in check by censure and peer pressure, and where each member personally knows and can expect to help and be helped by  the others.

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On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists.  What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.

" A government is body of people , usually notably ungoverned"

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Political revolution reduced or destroyed the power of the State, the kings, so that common men were more nearly free to do as they pleased.  But this economic revolution concentrated economic power in the hands of the State, the commissars, so that the lives, the livelihoods, of common men were once more subject to dictators.

Every advance toward personal liberty which had been gained by the religious revolution and by the political revolution, was lost by the collectivist economic reaction.

When I considered facts, I could not see how it could be otherwise.  The communist village was possible because there a few men, face to face, struggled each for his own self-interest, until out of that conflict a reasonably satisfactory balance was arrived at.  The same thing happens within every family.  But the government of men in hundreds of millions is another thing.  Time and space prevent a personal struggle of so many wills, each in personal encounter with each of the others arriving at a common decision.  The government of multitudes of men must be in the hands of a few men.Americans blamed Lenin because he did not establish a republic.  Had he done so, the fact that a few men ruled Russia would not have been altered.

I quite like the juxtaposition of economic vs political revolution.  We are trying to preserve the Politicl revolution of 1776 - they are trying to instigate an economic one.

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A republic is not possible in the Soviet Union because the aim of its rulers is an economic aim.  Economic power differs from political power.

Politics is a matter of broad principles which, once adopted may stand unchanged indefinitely; such principles as, for example, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.  From such principles are drawn general rules; as, no taxation without representation.  Such rules are embodied in law restricting or limiting political power; as, The sole right to levy taxes is vested in Congress and only Congress may spend the collected tax-money.  This most concrete application of political principle does not touch the intimate detail of an individual’s life.  We may carelessly give Congress its head, we may neglect to jerk back sharply on the bit, we may yip when we have to borrow money to pay our taxes, or we may lose our farm or house if we can’t and still our personal freedom of choice is ours.

Economics, however, is not concerned with abstract principles and general laws, but with material things; it deals directly with actual carloads of coal, harvests of grain, output of factories.  Economic power in action is subject to an infinity of immediately unpredictable crises affecting material things; it is subject to drought, storm, flood, earthquake and pestilence, to fashion, and diseases, and insects, to the breaking down and the wearing out of machinery.  And economics enters into the minute detail of each person’s existence - into his eating, drinking, working, playing, and personal habits.

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Russia’s State capitalism and the faint beginnings of free enterprise in Russia were destroyed, and the people controlled the national wealth.  That is to say, in actual fact a sincere and extremely able man, Lenin, was in power, devoted to the stupendous task of reducing multitudes of human beings to efficient economic order, for what this man and his followers honestly believed to be the ultimate material welfare of those multitudes.And what I saw was not an extension of human freedom, but the establishment of tyranny on a new, widely extended and deeper base.The historical novelty of the Soviet government was its motive.  Other governments have existed to keep peace among their subjects, or to amass money from them, or to use them in trade and war for the glory of the men governing them.  But the Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not.And I felt that, of all the tyrannies to which men have been subject, that tyranny would be the most ruthless and the most agonizing to bear.  There is some refuge for freedom under other tyrannies, since they are less thorough and not so remorselessly armed with righteousness. But from benevolence in economic power I could see no refuge whatever.

My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position [imposing “the good”] would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under of robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some points be satiated; but those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to heaven yet at the same time likely to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on the level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. - C.S. Lewis - God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (1972)

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For twenty-seven years the men who rule that country have toiled prodigiously to create precisely the society we dreamed of; a society in which insecurity, poverty, economic inequality, shall be impossible.To that end they have suppressed personal freedom; freedom of movement, of choice of work, freedom of self-expression in ways of life, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience. Given their aim, I do not see how they could have done otherwise.  Producing food from the earth and the sea, making goods from assembled raw materials, and their storing, exchanging, transporting, distributing and consuming by vast multitudes of human beings, are activities so intricately inter-related and inter-dependent that efficient control of any part of them demands control of the whole.  No man can so control multitudes of men without compulsion, and that compulsion must increase.It must increase because human beings are naturally diverse.  It is the nature of men to do the same thing in different ways, to experiment, invent, make mistakes, depart from the past in an infinite variety of directions.  Plants and animals repeat routine, but men who are not restrained will go into the future like explorers into a new country, and exploration is always wasteful.  Great numbers of explorers accomplish nothing and many are lost.Economic compulsion is, therefore, constantly threatened by human willfulness.  It must constantly overcome that willfulness, crush all impulses of egotism and independence, destroy variety of human desires and behavior.  Centralized economic power endeavoring to plan and to control the economic processes of a modern nation is under a necessity, either to fail or to tend to become absolute power in every province of human life.“It doesn’t matter what happens to individuals,” the communists say.  “The individual is nothing.  The only thing that matters is the collectivist State.The Communist hope of economic equality in the Soviet Union rests now on the death of all the men and women who are individuals.  A new generation, they tell me, had already been so shaped and schooled that a human mass is actually being created; millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the psychology of the bee-swarm, the ant-hill.This does not seem to incredible to me as it once did.  There may yet be a human bee-swarm in Russia.  It would not be unique in history; there was Sparta. There was Sparta, unchanging in its rigid forms of standardized behavior and thought until it was destroyed from without.  There is the bee-swarm, static, unchanging through untold generations of individuals who ceaselessly repeat the same pattern of action devoted to the welfare of all.  If there is progress in life, that it not life; it is a kind of animate and breathing death.”

Freedom for the modern liberal is freedom from insecurity- from material want - from personal responsibility to provide for yourself. It is the freedom to control the economic produce of others. The security of living as a herd animal. Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz. Well they have finally made a  swarm here... not of productive drones, but a swarm of locusts, and how will that serve them when the bees are dead?

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It was impossible to know France without knowing that the French demand order, discipline, the restraint of traditional forms, the bureaucratic regulation of human lives by centralized police power, and that the fierce French democracy is not a cry for individual liberty but an insistence that the upper classes shall not too harshly exploit the lower classes. I saw in Germany and in Austria scattered and leaderless sheep running this way and that, longing for the lost security of the flock and the shepherd.

Emphasis mine.

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Why will you talk about the rights of individuals!" Italians exclaimed, at last impatient. "An individual is nothing. As individuals we have no importance whatever. I will die, you will die, millions will live and die, but Italy does not die. Italy is important. Nothing matters but Italy."

This rejection of one's self as an individual was, I knew, the spirit animating the members of the Communist Party. I heard that it was the spirit beginning to animate Russia. It was the spirit of Fascism, the spirit that indubitably did revive Italy.

And what did Italy do then?

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No one who dreams of the ideal social order, the economy planned to eliminate waste and injustice, considers how much energy, how much human life, is wasted in administering and in obeying the best of regulations. No one considers how rigid such regulations become, nor that they must become rigid and resist change because their underlying purpose is to preserve men from the risks of chance and change in flowing time.

Americans have had in our country no experience of the discipline of a social order. We speak of a better social order when in fact we do not know what any social order is. We say that something is wrong with this system, when in fact we have no system. We use phrases learned from Europe, with no conception of the meaning of those phrases in actual living experience.

Well, we do now.

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But if this chaos were replaced by a system, a social order so perfect that there would be no trace of selfishness in it, an order perfectly functioning for the sole purpose of serving the public good, these men must be replaced by a bureaucracy.  And a bureaucracy is expensive, too. The bureaucracy that is necessary to controlling in detail, and according to a plan devised by men possessing centralized economic power, all the processes of business, industry, finance, and agriculture in a modern state is stupendously expensive. Such a bureaucracy is costly not only in ever-increasing payrolls but in human energy.  For it must take great and ever-increasing numbers of men from productive activity and set them to dreary work amid coils of red tape and masses of papers recording what other men have done and may perhaps be permitted to do, and ordered to do.Also bureaucracies are stupid and sluggish impediments to the whole range of human activities, as anyone knows who has struggled to move under their clogging weight in Europe.  Bureaucracies slow down, impede and postpone the realization of the multitude’s desires because they are not compelled, as in this American chaos business and industry were compelled, to serve those desires or perish.

And there goes your "absence of profit" savings moron leftists - all while actually gettign rid of ANY incentive to improve because everyone does it the same way - and must by law.

"It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, ... doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it. .." - Thomas Sowell.

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I read also that a hundred years ago 80 per cent of our population owned property and that today the percentage is 23.  Such an expropriation, if it has occurred, is alarming.  But it seems to me even more alarming that many American minds accept this statement as true upon no better proof than that they have read it, and from it conclude, first, that “something must be done,” and, second, that the proper thing to do is to take ownership away from individuals and have property administered by The State; which means, by autocratic rulers giving orders through an enormous bureaucracy.

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It may be that American kindness had grown from each American’s sense of insecurity.

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There is nothing new in planned and controlled economy.  Human beings have lived under various forms of that social security for six thousand years.  The new thing is in the anarchy of individualism, which has been operating freely only in this country for a century and a half.

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Americans are still paying the price of individual liberty, which is individual responsibility and insecurity.

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From the parrot-intellectuals came a din, “Everything’s changed now, there’s no more free land,” and “Freedom - for what?  Freedom to starve?”

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What I can’t understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government.”

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Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles therefore have no means of peaceful political action.  A vote for the New Deal approves national socialism, but a vote for the Republican Party does not repudiate national socialism. Defeating the New Deal at the polls might possibly check our country’s back-sliding, but it is not enough to set America on its forward way again.  The collectivist state was not invented in 1932.  The New Deal’s political principle comes from Plato through the Dark and Middle Ages to various developments by Machiavelli, Rousseau, Fourier, Hegel - who defines freedom as “submission to The State.” Karl Marx adopted this ancient lie from Hegel, and founded the First Socialist International upon it.  Marx wanted Hegel’s  “freedom” for “the working classes.”  Bismarck took the idea from Hegel and Marx, used it to crush the German liberals, and founded upon it his Socialpolitik, which is now called Social Security here.

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They called it “liberal” to suppress liberty; “progressive” to stop the free initiative that is the source of all human progress; “economic freedom,” to obstruct all freedom, and “economic equality” to make men slaves.

We have now been backsliding for a century, and the number of individualists has dwindled, and they political system has become so corrupt that no legitimate vote could be had even if individualists numbered more.  But history is made by interested minorities, and we are not yet disarmed.

" If this is to be our end, then I would have them make such an end as to be worthy of remembrance."- King Theoden. 

Online Pandora

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #5 on: July 11, 2014, 11:00:50 AM »
I find it interesting that Wilder wrote this in 1936, as the parts I excerpted could have been written just yesterday about current events.
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

"Let us assume for the moment everything you say about me is true. That just makes your problem bigger, doesn't it?"

Offline Libertas

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #6 on: July 11, 2014, 11:03:22 AM »
Kind of AynRand-ish.
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Offline Weisshaupt

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #7 on: July 11, 2014, 11:14:09 AM »
I find it interesting that Wilder wrote this in 1936, as the parts I excerpted could have been written just yesterday about current events.

I am wondering about the date - because she references events in 1944

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Today, American farmers are compressed into a peasant class, subject to orders and punishments decreed by a ruling class.  Today, in America, there is a working class; by order of July 1, 1944, fifty-eight million Americans are tied to the assembly lines as serfs in the Middle Ages were tied to the land. 

Is this potentially a foreword she wrote later for a book published in 1936?

Offline Libertas

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #8 on: July 11, 2014, 11:21:15 AM »
There clearly were additions made after 1936, that's all I took away...even though at the top it said it was published as an article in 1936.
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Online Pandora

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #9 on: July 11, 2014, 11:55:45 AM »
I find it interesting that Wilder wrote this in 1936, as the parts I excerpted could have been written just yesterday about current events.

I am wondering about the date - because she references events in 1944

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Today, American farmers are compressed into a peasant class, subject to orders and punishments decreed by a ruling class.  Today, in America, there is a working class; by order of July 1, 1944, fifty-eight million Americans are tied to the assembly lines as serfs in the Middle Ages were tied to the land. 

Is this potentially a foreword she wrote later for a book published in 1936?

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Note

Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968) published this text in 1936 as an article for the Saturday Evening Post under the title Credo. It was then reprinted as a pamphlet with the new title Give Me Liberty. In it, she highlighted her disillusionment with socialism that was, in historical reality, nothing else that bureaucratic statism and advocated individualism as the only way to uphold freedom and to oppose any type of enslavement and oppression.

Could be the pamphlet was published, with additions, ten years later, as she referred to "when I wrote ten years ago" (or something similar) in the text of the piece.

eta:  Ahh, here it is, on page XIV, "When I first wrote this book ten years ago ...".
« Last Edit: July 11, 2014, 12:24:22 PM by Pandora »
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

"Let us assume for the moment everything you say about me is true. That just makes your problem bigger, doesn't it?"

Offline Libertas

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #10 on: July 11, 2014, 12:24:18 PM »
Yup, that's it!  She updated it a decade later!  I read that but might have lost context the first time through...I read too dang fast sometimes...
 ::bashing::
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Online Pandora

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #11 on: July 11, 2014, 12:25:22 PM »
Read upthread; I "eta'd" my post.
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

"Let us assume for the moment everything you say about me is true. That just makes your problem bigger, doesn't it?"

Offline Libertas

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #12 on: July 11, 2014, 12:26:41 PM »
 ::hat-tip::
We are now where The Founders were when they faced despotism.

Online Pandora

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Re: "Give Me Liberty"
« Reply #13 on: July 11, 2014, 12:27:38 PM »
And again, on page XV, "Ten years ago I wrote: The test comes now."
"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." - Mark Twain

"Let us assume for the moment everything you say about me is true. That just makes your problem bigger, doesn't it?"