8 thoughts on “Worth Pondering”

  1. The simplest response is that someone has to make whatever is provided for them. If none are willing, nothing gets made. We are plagued right now by an elite class that has never made anything but money. The money often by questionable means.

  2. I’d say that almost every society has a set of things that are expected and things that are provided. In Communist countries, what was expected was obedience to the regime and verbal agreement with the same…what was provided was a certain minimal standard of living and the assurance that you were working for The Future. In Nazi Germany, things provided included a sense of racial superiority, regardless of one’s actual accomplishments. In American society, for the most part, what was expected was taking responsibility for oneself, obeying the laws, and defending the country when need. What was provided was opportunity and a sense of personal freedom.

    Today? Increasingly, what is expected is the parroting of various Woke verbal formulations.

    What about illegal immigrants today? A lot is provided in the way of free transportation and various benefits…what, if anything, is expected? Certainly not compliance with laws.

    What about kids in school?

  4. Related:
    If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
    I like this guy. Pretty much banned everywhere in France during WW2. Worth a read.

  5. The St-Ex quote is from his novel ‘Citadelle’, published in English under the unfortunate title ‘Wisdom of the Sands’. It’s a novel of ideas, representing the musings of a fictional desert prince on life and government. St-Ex never got a chance to finish and edit it; he disappeared flying a P-38 in 1944.

  6. Another way to look at, in addition to social contract, is one of civic virtue; ancient Greeks and Romans would see it a matter of separating the public good from private interests.

    Aristotle and others point to the corrosive effect democracy has on civic virtue and that’s something we have seen in our country. However I would posit that the decline in civic virtues is directly related not such much to the desire to get things as the ability of government to provide them, the desire to get them has been eternal but only since the New Deal and Great Society have there being an administrative apparatus that not only can provide such goodies but that can be captured by “special interests”

    This problem is accentuated by our current postmodern regime which rejects the very notion of civic virtue, seeing it as merely a social construct designed to perpetuate a certain oppressor/oppressed power structure. Take the welfare reform movement of the 1990s which connected the eligibility to receive benefits with the need for the recipient to work. The Ancients would understand how that reform of the 1990s would fray over time and need to be renewed given the nature of democratic politics, but what is different now is that it is not viewed as even a legitimate topic for discussion and to be dismissed as racist

  7. To me that statement is succinct and frightenly accurate. So much of our elected officials today are there because of what they have doled out to the electorate. And at $14 trillion now in debt I suspect things will be coming to a head shortly.

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