Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Wednesday, April 22. 2009

QQQ: The rations of slavery

Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.


P.J. O'Rouke, 1993

Posted by Bird Dog in Quotidian Quotable Quote (QQQ) at 10:09 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

As I've said before, Bird Dog, Our present parlous condition is partly due to that unknown but evil person in the bowels of the D.C. government, who decided, some years ago, to substitute the word 'entitlement' for the word 'benefits.'

They don't mean the same thing at all. Benefits, are nice stuff provided to a citizenry or to employees by a generous company during good economic times, with the unspoken but understood corollary that they might sometime be temporarily withheld if the organization gets into economic trouble. 'Entitlements' are a whole other thing, and must be supplied even if it beggars the supplier financially. The results of this invidious substitution of terms are far-reaching and long-lasting, as the more intelligent among us now know and could have predicted.

Marianne
#1 Marianne Matthews on 2009-04-22 10:42 (Reply)
Freedom is empowerment. It's the only thing that allows a person the pursuit of happiness to earn all those rights.

Freedom is probably the ultimate empowerment. We have lists and lists of dead soldiers to prove it is worth dying for.
`
#2 Meta on 2009-04-22 12:30 (Reply)
Happiness is a warm gun, seems the gist of PJ, here.

That empowerment worked for the Somali alleged pirate till him cry-y-yed.

Now, him not empowered but him has established doubt that him a pirate.

Mom said, pirates don't cry.

Americans on welfare are free despite yankee distain.

PJ needs to find a home.
#3 Leag on 2009-04-22 13:05 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.