Let’s start the day off with a little Ayn Rand:
“Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We voted on it. Yes, ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars—rotten, whining, sniveling beggars all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family,’ and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’—so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because it’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm—so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?”
Rand was prone to repetition, and few would accuse her of being overly subtle, but she did capture the dynamic that championing need over rights puts into force. Multitudes of competing claimants inevitably arise, simply because there’s no cost to doing so. They don’t have to offer anything but their whines, though some will supplement them with threats to public order.
Need as an entitlement is the seed for a carnivorous plant whose growth accelerates continuously. It can’t be constrained; it can only be killed. But it is not unique. Any substitute proposed for rights – “the legacy of slavery,” “a history of marginalization,” “the public good,” what have you – will produce a similarly ravenous plant with the same growth curve.
Rather than beat a concept this important into the magma layer, I’ll close here with a question for my Gentle Readers:
That has not experienced such a growth curve?
I’ll be waiting for your contributions. And yes: more anon.
3 comments
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.
— George Carlin
I was reading Culturcidal today – and found this:
“…what the conservative movement considers “fighting” is usually someone willing to be a defiant @sshole, shaking their fist at the sky as the ship goes down because so few people in the conservative movement are actually willing to get up off the couch and do the work of patching the hole.
I’m feeling better physically – asthma is improved, knees are in better shape, energy levels are up – so, my big goal (AFTER the house closing on 5/18), will be to dip my toes into local politics/volunteer activities. I may end up getting involved with the ARES activities (ham radio public service), or might find something BOTH my husband and myself can do together.
It’s going to be one of the last efforts I’ll be able to make in my life; not that I’m planning to check out soon, just that it’s the work of several decades, with an emphasis on helping younger people develop their expertise and skills.
Oh yes. Cutting the wasteful spending and reducing the size of government. Leaving those to government is a pipedream equivalent to Merrick Garland’s DOJ reforming itself.
BTW, that bureaucracy proves that Conquest’s 3rd Law is a failure. It is no secret cadre of the enemies of justice who have taken it over.