Quotations

Quote of the Day

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Richard Epstein, Rand Paul’s Fatal Pacifism:

There is nothing in libertarian theory that justifies dithering at home as conditions abroad get worse by the day.

This point has been one of the main differences among people who consider themselves libertarian. Libertarian isolationism in response to threats of aggression from overseas is like a self-defense strategy in which you let an assailant shoot at you before you think yourself justified in shooting back. In reality you sometimes have to take preemptive action if you want to survive. Life isn’t a court of law where you have the luxury of due process before deciding if you are justified in punishing the accused. An individual, group or nation that behaves in a way that reasonable people see as threatening should have no expectation of being left alone by potential victims.

Quote(s) of the Day — one from a review of America 3.0

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Arnold Kling has a nice quote about the relative importance of cultural over institutional factors. If for some reason the US Government stopped working overnight, the American people would not be plunged into chaos. We have a culture which would permit us to voluntarily organize much of what we need to do. As Mr. Kling put it:

[T]he cultural margin is more important than the institutional margin. … [T]here are no societies in which anarchy will work well but government would work poorly, or vice-versa. Instead, on the one hand there are well-developed cultures, which could have good government or good anarchy, while on the other hand there are poorly-developed cultures, which could have only bad government or bad anarchy.

Arnold Kling

If you are not currently making a daily visit to Arnold Kling’s blog Askblog you must begin doing so.

Note also, Arnold Kling’s review of America 3.0, entitled America’s Past and America’s Future.

He concludes:

The vision that Bennett and Lotus put forth is not the technocratically-run national system that most contemporary politicians and pundits presume is ideal. Nor is it the philosophically-driven rights-based society that libertarians might prefer. However, if the authors are correct in their cultural anthropology, then their idea of America 3.0 is what fits best with our culture.

This is a nice summary of the future we hope to see in America.

History Friday: Oliver P. Morton, The Great War Governor

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I mentioned Oliver P. Morton, the Governor of Indiana during the Civil War, in this post.

The statue in front of the Indiana state house has a plaque which says he shall “ever to be known in history as”¨ The Great War Governor.” When the Union veterans who built the state house and put up the statue were alive, I am sure they believed the heroic deeds of the war would “ever be known … .”

But one of the lessons of history is the fleetingness of fame. The things that move and inspire one generation are rejected by the next, or simply forgotten. This is especially true in America, where we are a forward looking people and typically not terribly concerned about what happened in the past. Henry Ford spoke for America when he said history is more or less bunk.

This short article from the Indiana Historical Bureau, entitled OLIVER P. MORTON AND CIVIL WAR POLITICS IN INDIANA is worth reading.

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Quote of the Day, or, A Challenge to the Millennial Generation

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They stand now on the threshold of public life. They are in the leash, but in a moment they will be slipped. What will be their fate? Will they maintain in august assemblies and high places the great truths which, in study and in solitude, they have embraced? Or will their courage exhaust itself in the struggle, their enthusiasm evaporate before hollow-hearted ridicule, their generous impulses yield with a vulgar catastrophe to the tawdry temptations of a low ambition? Will their skilled intelligence subside into being the adroit tool of a corrupt party? Will Vanity confound their fortunes, or Jealousy wither their sympathies? Or will they remain brave, single, and true; refuse to bow before shadows and worship phrases; sensible of the greatness of their position, recognise the greatness of their duties; denounce to a perplexed and disheartened world the frigid theories of a generalising age that have destroyed the individuality of man, and restore the happiness of their country by believing in their own energies, and daring to be great?

Conigsby, or The New Generation (1844) by Benjamin Disraeli.

Will they? Will they believe in their own energies? Will they dare to be great? Will they restore the happiness of their country? Will they denounce the frigid theories that have destroyed the individuality of man?

Incidentally the book is great.


Quote of the Day

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[W]e are swimming, or drowning, in a rhetoric of national, social and individual failure. Producers of this rhetoric … are so filled with narcissistic self-doubts as to depict America’s many adversities and frustrations as impending apocalypses or Auschwitzian holocausts. … No responsible historian advocates insensitivity to America’s historical warts, present difficulties and conceivable future problems … . Attention must obviously be paid to a nation’s dynamics of decline if this is what afflicts us. But attention does not require accepting an assumption that America’s reverses or unfulfilled goals are equivalent to total failures or disasters, or that America if not uniquely blessed, is uniquely cursed for allegedly singular sins.

Harold M. Hyman, American Singularity: The 1787 Northwest Ordinance, The 1862 Homestead And Morrill Acts, and the 1944 G.I. Bill (1986), referencing Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984).