Tea at Trianon: What Both The Left And Right Get Wrong About Freedom

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, July 28, 2019

What Both The Left And Right Get Wrong About Freedom

From Andrew Klavan at The Daily Wire:

If you want to keep the values alive the preserve conservatism, preserve Americanism and preserve free markets in fact, the underlying atmosphere for free markets, the underlying ground in which free markets grow, are good communities, churches that people can go to, families that are kept together. You can't just keep saying to people, "Oh well, business has to be free, so your community is gone, your church is gone, your family's gone, your wife has to work. Too bad." It doesn't work that way, everything needs bookends.

No system can control all things, it just doesn't work that way. So, you have to feel your way. I mean I don't like the idea of a welfare state, in principle, I'm against it. In principle, I'm against the idea that you take money away from one person and give it to another without a welfare state. You can't keep freedom alive. Even Hayek, this Fredrick Hayek said this, he said, "you have to have a welfare state where people will be too afraid to be free. You don't want people so afraid of what's going to happen to their children if they lose their job or if they get sick that they will not be free." You know it's all well and good to go on the radio and sit in front of a microphone and slam your fist into your palm and say "this welfare state is destroying everything." Everything needs bookends, no principal will keep you alive.

I get in these conversations when I go to colleges and speak because young people obviously are idealistic. They should be idealistic, and they say to you, "Well aren't you violating your principles?" Yeah, I am violating my principles, I’ve got to. I’ve got to violate my principles to keep the ground on which my principles stand alive. If people are too afraid to be free, they won't be free, so you need a bit of a welfare state. There's no such thing as an age of republic or an age of democracy that doesn't have some kind of welfare state.

We have a twofold problem; one is that the Left uses that fact to keep selling us a bigger and bigger welfare state. I believe that people shouldn't starve in the streets if takes government action, I wish it could be done through our churches, I wish it were done through churches and communities, but if it takes government action just to keep people from being too afraid to be free, I'll violate my principles and do it. But what we know is, the left is constantly adding things to the pile, right? We got to pay for college, you've got to pay for childcare, you've got to pay for this and that, you know you got to pay for choice, and we've got to pay for birth control. Choices that people make that they don't have to make, that I shouldn't have to pay for. (Read more.)