“The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.”
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it."
“The will of men is not shattered (by the welfare state), but softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence. It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, until each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859).
From a post on Virginia News Source, http://www.virginianewssource.com/.
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was the French political thinker and historian who wrote, among other works, Democracy in America (1935), a book based on his travels through America in the early 19th Century.
The book provided reflections on American policy society and attempted to explain why America was different from Europe. For de Tocqueville, this country was an open society where the work ethic prevailed and the average man was independent and self-reliant. Although his book does focus on democracy, its central focus was on liberty. He once said that “the only passions I have are love of liberty and human dignity”.
Liberty and democracy are not the same thing. Democracy strives to gain the consent of all the governed in the determination of the affairs of men and women and spreads that aspiration far and wide. It focuses on the work we need to do together for the common good. As de Tocqueville emphasized, it is a wonderful way to organize the polity and consistent with liberty for it promotes the self-organizing of the state by a free and independent people.
Liberty, on the other hand, is much more personal and requires that the passion for democracy be kept in check if one is to remain the master of one’s own fate. As de Tocqueville noted, “everyone is the best and sole judge of his own private interest . . . society has no right to control a man's actions unless they are prejudicial to the common weal or unless the common weal demands his help. This doctrine is universally admitted in the United States.”
Liberty is also much more difficult than democracy to achieve. As the historian Henry Steele Commager commented, "Liberty must be worked at, must be achieved, and it has rarely been achieved anywhere in the whole of history. It requires a most extraordinary self-control, self-denial, wisdom, sagacity, vision to protect liberty in the face of all the forces that mitigate and militate against it. And Tocqueville regarded centralization as the most dangerous of all the threats to liberty."
Liberty is at risk. We live in an age of increasing centralization and concern for the shallow equality found in applying rules and regulations to achieve uniformity rather than the freedom that celebrates the right of each man to act for himself and rise and fall on his own. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rush to “health care reform” where a huge segment of the economy is being effectively nationalized in the name of providing equal access by all to what by its very nature is a diverse set of services that can neither be provided equally to all nor be applied uniformly to all.
Health care is not a standardized widget to be distributed in equal amount or kind to each member of the population. Saying the government is going to provide equal access to a product or service that may or may not be needed by any person and in any event must be highly personalized before it is used is utterly meaningless. Health care is not and cannot be a valid objective in a democracy because it cannot be delivered democratically. At the same time, it is a threat to liberty for it soften, bends, and guides the will of men, as Tocqueville put it, and makes them sheep as it centralizes the decisions that belong to each individual.
Let us remember that de Tocqueville believed that of the two true liberty is far more important than the superficial equality. This country has been blessed by liberty. The question is whether we can retain it at a time when we insist on centralizing everything and asking government to do what it clearly cannot do.
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