July 12th
It's amazing how much rage my intermittent Internet connection can evoke from me. If an inanimate object could somehow be affected by profanity, my AT&T card would have shaped up and flown right several hours ago.
It's always slow, so I always have a game of Spider Solitaire up and going. While waiting for a window to open, I'm working on my stats. I have a win percentage of seventy two on this computer and eight four on the lap top.This represents some serious time and thought investment, and testifies to the crappy quality of my internet connection.
This morning it was especially bad, I think due to a storm system that's massing right over the tops of the trees in my back yard. Also, apparently trees themselves soak up the signal, so I'm sitting in a air card dead zone.
We can't switch to a different system, because we are four hundred yards away from the last bit of cable any cable company has in this area. If we wished to shell out four thousand dollars, the company would extend the line for us and we could have broadband. I'm ok with paying eighty to ninety dollars a month for super speedy connectivity, it's worth that much to me. But it's certainly not worth that on top of an outlay of $4,000 big ones.
July 13th
My books came in yesterday and I pretty much had to scrap bits of my brain off the ceiling last night because they blew. my. mind.
And I've only read the introduction on both. "The Federalist Papers" is pretty much like reading something in a different language. I read the first twenty one pages and I could feel my brain literally sputtering in exhaustion. I couldn't keep a grasp on all the concepts going on, so I set it aside and opened up "The Road To Serfdom," which is at least a little more current.
Then I felt like crying because I was reading about the downfall of liberty in post World War II England. I didn't want to know in so much detail how England fell from the birthplace of the Magna Carta to a Welfare state, but learn I did. In the intro.
Then I turn the page and there is the title and some quotes and I actually got chills up my spine.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
"I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time to which we live I am ready to worship it." -A. de Tocqueville
Then I turn the page and see that Hayek has a single sentence opposite the chapter page: "To socialists of all parties." Which is when I got the chills.
I put the book down then, but I stayed up for hours afterword with my brain whirring around. Already tangents are shooting off in my head. Hayek said this in his work "Freedom and the Economic System":
"In the end, agreement that planning is necessary, together with the inability of the democratic assembly to agree on a particular plan, must strengthen the demand that the government, or some single individual, should be given powers to act on their own responsibility. It becomes more and more the accepted belief that, if one wants to get things done, the responsible director of affairs must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure."
Sound familiar? It's the growing cry of many on the left, and increasingly the practice of the Obama Administration to throw off the rule of law (which is democratic procedure) and simply force through the good that they believe must be done.
It amazes me that people do not understand the incredible danger and cost of this. I think it is largely the result of poor education. I venture to guess that if every American read "The 5,00 Year Leap," and then the other two books I am reading, there is no way that this Administration would ever have been elected. There is equally no way that Bush would have been re-elected. Or elected at all. One could go back quite a ways. The whole trajectory of our government would be different.
But we are no longer taught the history of our own country, we are generally ignorant of the ways in which our Constitution and government structure was meant to uphold individual liberty. If we don't know what we have or had, then we won't be able to recognize when it's gone or when it's being taken from us.
"If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson
I have to go eat lunch; my phone just told me so.
