In Defense of Valentine's Day

During an email discussion of Valentine's Day today, someone quipped that those who celebrate Valentine's Day are "slaves to the Hallmark holiday." David Hunt had an enjoyable response to that, and I got his permission to share it here:

A few years ago [my wife] and I watched "The Karate Kid Part II", a film I haven't seen since childhood. Though a pale shadow of the original, it's still a decent film; certainly not the fairly dismal flick that was number 3, nor the abomination that was number 4. One wouldn't think a middling eighties film sequel would be the source for an important social insight, but it was through watching this movie that I first really began to understand the importance of ritual.

Beforehand, I had been more of your mind. I looked on the ritualistic, from weddings to certain holidays, with a kind of "why bother?" disdain, feeling myself above the grooved-in modes of culture that others seemed to trek through, unthinkingly, as if on some kind of auto-pilot. They were just going along as they were directed, but I was standing on the higher plane above, surveyor of the meaningless random slash marks in our cultural landscape that these poor lemmings were trodding through without a thought. What did they gain from acquiescing to these routines? Nothing? I would skip over them happily. That I felt superior for doing so was only a dimly acknowledged side benefit of my ruggedly individual choice.

But I was wrong. The lemmings were right.

During Karate Kid II, there is a scene where Daniel is undergoing some kind of courtship ritual with his new Japanese girlfriend. I have no idea whether this scene is founded on true Okinawan culture or merely some fertile screenwriter's mind, but that's irrelevant. She is treating the ritual very solemnly, carefully undergoing each step, when all of a sudden Daniel makes light of a certain bit, trying to generate a laugh. But he doesn't get the connection he was looking for. Instead of chuckling along with him, she gives him a look of stern rebuke, chastening him back into the solemnity of the ritual's steps and processes.

For some reason, this little bit, a quite honest moment with the self-aware American trying to make light of an old-world tradition and coming out on the wrong end of the transaction, opened my eyes to what ritual really is. Ritual is a sign of respect, a communication that one is removing oneself from his normal life for a bit in order to demonstrate his seriousness and commitment to something he finds special. The arbitrariness of ritual is its point. In doing a series of steps that are patently unnecessary, and something out of orbit from how one would normally behave, one is putting a stake in the ground, saying "I do this as a symbol of respect, in order to show that this other thing matters deeply to me."

It sounds simple, but I'd never quite seen it that way before. Now, thanks to Karate Kid II, I do.

And so, I will celebrate Valentine's Day tomorrow with my wife. I'll skate the cultural groove along with everybody else, and do so happily. Even though I am aware of the holiday's origins, origins don't always inform meaning, and to our culture, Valentine's Day has become a ritualized day to show the one you love that they are special enough to you that you'll engage in the same societal ritual that the rest of our culture is engaging in on that day; that you'll put aside your own things in order to honor the other on that day. I may be a greeting card slave, but I'm a happy slave, and I'm looking forward to the ritual.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Wyatt Randall Hunt...

... was born last Sunday, January 15th, at 3:15 a.m. Hooray!

All went well, all are well, so all is well.

Much Like the Hippopotamus

The hippopotamus is a ridiculous looking animal with its absurd size, bizarre proportions, and odd features.

So it is at the end with pregnant women, and I can write that because I am one.

At the very end of pregnancy, the woman usually assumes a shape something like the grotesque female imaginings of R. Crumb. (No, I'm not a fan of his, but I have seen Crumb.) Or, as I said to my husband this morning, something like a series of orbs in a sock.

It is a good trade though. This transformation is usually temporary, and you get a kid in the end.

Unlike the hippopotamus.

Predictable Things

Trinity wanted to ride the tiger. Now the inevitable.

I Empathize

Want the Backstory to the Dawkins Refuses to Debate Craig Kerfuffle?

This presents it nicely:



Heh.

"Only Crazy Helicopter Parents Freak Out About Elementary School Kids Walking Around Cities Unsupervised."

At least that's what I hear. But I beg to differ.

The Cr48 Chromebook

A Cr48 showed up at my door several months ago, so here's my brief take.

This has become the most used computer in my house. It comes out of hibernation instantly, and it boots up from off in just a few seconds. As someone who only has time to access the Internet in short bursts, this is ideal.

This computer cannot replace a regular computer for storing pictures offline or running programs, but it kills a regular computer for accessing the Internet. Because it's a browser in a box, there is no waiting for the browser to load. It's always open. And because there are no additional programs, there is nothing to bog the system down and no routine maintenance to perform. Due to the machine's simplicity, the battery lasts forever.

If I manage to break this one, I will buy another.

"Weinergate tells a cautionary tale." or Why I Am a Libertarian Conservative

To speak of what “the founders believed,” you have to speak broadly, ideologically, not monolithically. But one thing they knew, to a man, was that they were sinful men. And even those who trusted in their own rectitude, attributed depravity to others. So with each codicil of the Constitution they labored to answer the question: What would weasels do? And then they built a barrier against that tendency. ...

Men are weak, wily, wicked. Don’t give them any more power over you than absolutely necessary...

By restraining the federal government to a few, specific functions, and setting it up with checks and balances, and yes, negative liberties, we mitigate the harmful effects of human nature. Smaller government is also easier to monitor, and error and evil harder to hide.

The Utopian dreams of the Left perpetually die on the altar of human frailty.

For more, and you should read the rest of it, go here.

Would it be illegal...

... to pay Paul Ryan or Chris Christie ten million dollars to run for President?

I don't think you'd have any trouble raising the money. Maybe if one of them is close enough to the edge of running, it would be enough to put him over.

"C'mon, what would Huckabee have to say to make you change your mind about him? What's one thing he could say?"

"Endorse the Club for Growth."

Mamet Must Read

This. It's about David Mamet's experience of converting from a liberal to a conservative, and it captures that experience perfectly. That's it. That's what it's like. If you've done the same, you'll see yourself somewhere in it. If you haven't, you can find out what it is and what it's like.

And then there's this:

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .  .  . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

I don't get very personal on this blog. I'm not interested in sharing with you my in-depth biography and personal psychology. But this was like a revelation. If I write that it was like a punch in the chest but in a good way, will that makes sense to you? Because that's what it was.

David Mamet sums up in that bit why I can't bring myself to go back to school. I think higher ed, outside of mathematics and hard sciences, has become largely a sham, a fraud.

I was talking to a dear friend the other day with plenty of graduate school credentials. She was complaining that most of the highly educated (read: highly credentialed) now seem to take it for granted that there is no objective reality, everything is a construct of personal experience. Academics aren't about seeking out truth anymore; they're about creating narratives that will further the academic's vision of what reality should be.

Once you decide that there is no truth to pursue, there is no point to academics. At that point, you've become so obsessed with admiring the leaves that you've chainsawed through the trunk to get it out of your way.

So what then? If you want an education outside of the hard sciences, what do you do?

Maybe you can find an exceptional institution truly dedicated to the pursuit of truth. I don't know the way to do that, but perhaps you do.

If not, you have to go out and pursue that education yourself. There are extensive resources for that now, and you don't have to be a rich guy to use interlibrary loan. Good luck.

Still a Birther? What Do You Need?

Here it is.

For a few people, hard core birthers, that's not enough. I guess they'll have to wait for the 35mm film of Obama's birth with the "Welcome to Hawaii" sign in the background and the bald eagle cutting the cord at the end.

"Stay-at-home parents are good for society, but I am a smart, capable woman with great promise. Don't I have more to offer the world?"

Many people think there's a lot of controversy around being a stay-at-home parent. I think that's overblown. People have different opinions, but I don't think the issue is as heated as some over-hyping rag-peddlers would try to sell it.

That said, it's my opinion that it's good for families to have a stay-at-home parent while the children are young. Usually, the stay-at-home parent is the mother, thus the title of this post. But this post isn't about whether or not it's good to have a stay-at-home parent. This post is about whether or not someone who already thinks it's good should be a stay-at-home parent herself.

To narrow the focus of this post, I will only address having a full time career versus staying at home. I will not address hybrid options, such as those where parents arrange their schedules to share duties or one parent works at home while also acting as a stay-at-home parent.

I know people who are of the opinion that staying at home is fine for regular people but a bad idea for the highly educated, driven, or capable. The "elite," they argue, have more to offer the world and shouldn't be limited by parenting duties. I disagree with that. Here are a few of my reasons:

1. If your children don't have a stay-at-home parent, who is staying home with them? Family or, more likely, someone you hired? Is that person a good stand-in for you? If you think you are a particularly gifted person, couldn't you be a particularly gifted stay-at-home parent? Is the person watching your children as intellectually curious as you are? Does that person care about your children as much as you do? The person you choose to be with your child instead of you will have a profound effect on him. That person will affect your child's habits, outlook, speech, areas of interest, exposure to the world, etc. That person is extraordinarily important. That person could be you. Is that a position you want to outsource to someone who you, by your own reasoning not to stay home, deem less exceptional than yourself?
2. If you live in the United States and are of average health, you have a life expectancy of about eighty years. Children do not stay very young for very long. Could you pursue your interests as hobbies for a time and pursue outside achievements after your children move out or at least enter school? If so, what's the hurry? The world will still be around when your kids are not.
3. It's a common elitist attitude to think that if you're extremely intelligent or successful or creative or wealthy or beautiful or something else, the common rules don't apply to you. Societal strictures are for the little men. But does the world actually work that way? No trait confers harmony, emotional health, or fulfillment of potential on members of a family. Those things require work, and they are often overlooked. Perhaps family work is important enough to merit a sort of family CEO. That can be the role of the stay-at-home parent.
4. If you already think that stay-at-home parents are a societal good, and this post is only answering these questions from the perspective of someone who does, what sort of society are you creating if you say that the most promising people should not be stay-at-home parents? If you contribute to the idea that the best and brightest are above the stay-at-home role, are you not creating a society wherein that role is not valued? Who is going to want to stay at home with their children if doing so is viewed by the culture as an admission of mediocrity? You can't help but shape the culture you're in. If you have a vision for the culture, a good place to start molding it is in your own house.

UPDATE: I just received this in my email. Maybe I should forward my blog post to Mary Elizabeth Williams.

A Minor Disagreement

I have no problem with what Pawlenty said. In fact, I would have given exactly the same answer.

The crosshairs on the map aren't his style. So what? Not my style either. We need our politicians to be libertarian conservatives, not the GOP Borg. He's saying you don't have to like the style, but whether or not you do, it certainly didn't cause any violence.

I see no problem with that. The answer is "man enough" for me, and my bar for that is pretty high.

And Now, a Public Address from the President of the United States

"I’ve said before that I felt that the middle-class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high-end tax cuts.

"I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. Then people will question the wisdom of that strategy. In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed."

"It's like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, but the original one. You know, from '74. And I'm Walter Matthau. No, no, wait; I guess I'm the mayor. So I'm paying because of the people on the train.

"It's the American people on the train, and it's a runaway train. But the Republicans aren't even on the train. We have an undercover guy watching them not on the train.

(Aside directed away from mic: "Is that supposed to be Snowe? ... Biden says it's him? That doesn't make any sense.")

"Anyway, the Republicans are dividing the money. But one of them will electrocute himself. Maybe some of you haven't seen this movie. Just stay with me here.

"The point remains that electrocuting yourself, like a tax cut for the rich, is bad. But we can't allow the American people on the train to get hurt, so we're not going to crash the motorcycle carrying the ransom. We will only allow the top motorcycle driver in the country to deliver the ransom for the American people, and we will not lie about being at the tunnel. At the end of which, there is a light... the light of jobs.

(Aside directed away from mic: "When you wrote this, had you even watched this movie recently? ... Why didn't you just use 'Die Hard'?")

"Look. We all know that runaway trains kill people, and so we have to pay the Republican hijackers so that they will electrocute themselves and not shoot the American people who are on the train that the Republicans are not on... they would be shooting them not directly in this case because they're in different places, but indirectly, and just as harmfully, with .... money, or taking their money ... with shooting, which is involved. Really with today's technology, you could have a gun that shoots in one area and the bullet tracks its target and follows it to kill it. Actually that's something like a missile.

"The Republicans want to kill you with missiles. Thank you. Yippee ki yay, my fellow Americans and goodnight."

Humor for Election Day

25 Greatest Figures in American History

... according to this poll of conservative bloggers that included me.

I think this group list of greatests came out much better than the group list of worsts. I was especially glad to see Norman Borlaug receive enough votes to appear.

This is the list I sent to RWN:

Norman Borlaug
Washington
Jefferson
Lincoln
Franklin
Madison
John Quincy Adams
Reagan
Edison
MLK
Frederick Douglas
Noah Webster
Henry Knox
Lewis & Clark (That's two, so I suppose I cheated there.)
George Mason
John Adams
Eisenhower
Phyllis Schlafly
Davy Crockett
Neil Armstrong (Representing all those who helped to build the space program during its infancy.)

I had a very hard time narrowing down to twenty. (At least one of the ones I didn't cut is purposely controversial. Have to have at least one like that in any list.) I had to cut a lot who I would have just as easily left on the list. Others I'd like to have included are Patrick Henry, Daniel Boone, Calvin Coolidge, George Patton, Henry Ford, Thomas Paine, the Wright Brothers, Ethan Allen, Andrew Carnegie, Sam Walton, and Bob Hope.

Who would be on your list?

25 Worst Figures in American History...

... according to this poll of conservative bloggers that included me.

I did not vote for these:
23) Saul Alinsky (7)
23) Bill Clinton (7)
23) Hillary Clinton (7)
19) Michael Moore (7)
19) George Soros (8)
19) Al Sharpton (8)
13) Al Gore (9)
13) Noam Chomsky (9)
13) Richard Nixon (9)
13) Jane Fonda (9)
13) Harry Reid (9)
13) Nancy Pelosi (9)
2) Barack Obama (23)
1) Jimmy Carter (25)

Apart from Carter and Obama, there aren't a lot of votes backing those candidates. I'm guessing that the votes for other historical figures were split, and that led to current, better-known figures winning the vote. Forty-three bloggers responded, so while seven of them did vote for, say, Bill Clinton, thirty-six of them did not. I would be interested to see a full list of every figure that received votes.

People I voted for who did not make the list:
Robert Hanssen
John Marshall
Boss Tweed
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Bull Connor
Roger B. Taney
Huey Long
George Wallace
Suge Knight

Some of those are purposely provocative choices. You can also probably tell that I especially dislike machine-style politics. I failed to cover criminals. Major figures in organized crime could be on a list like this. There were also, sadly, many more Presidents who could have been on it.

Who would be on your list?

How Does Your Church Allocate Its Resources?

From A Life Apart: Hasidism in America:

When the Satmar Rebbe came to America he saw many empty synagogues and only a few religious schools. He said, "We will do exactly the opposite from these Americanized Jews. We will get by with small synagogues. Instead, we will build big schools with many children learning the Torah."

Everybody Wants a Free Pony or A Civics Primer for Horse Lovers

Adapted from my comments at Althouse.

Everybody wants a free pony, and there's no easier way to get votes if you're a politician than by buying them with pony promises. But you can't promise ponies to everybody at the same time because you'd run out of ponies, and no one would believe that you had so many ponies to hand out anyway. So each politician, or pony handerouter, picks a few groups and promises them ponies.

Of course, that just makes more people want ponies because if one guy gets a free pony then the next guy thinks it's only fair that he gets a free pony too. And the people who do get free ponies just want more free ponies because after you've finagled the first one for free, the finagling begins to feel a bit like being paid what you're owed. You're a good guy, right? If the world is handing out free ponies, why shouldn't you get yours?

Unfortunately, there aren't enough ponies. And ponies are never free. That's the reality. But politicians don't get elected easily by dealing in reality. They get elected easily by promising ponies.

Take Social Security for instance. The government said it would take ponies from everyone, breed the ponies, and then give everyone his ponies plus some extra ponies at retirement.

But politicians being politicians, they couldn't stand to see all those ponies sitting idle in the government stables when they could be trading those ponies for votes. So they opened the stables and traded all the ponies.

People got angry that all their ponies were gone, but the bureaucrats said, "Don't worry. We'll just take even MORE ponies from your children, and we'll give the ponies to you!" People like ponies so much that they thought this was a pretty good deal. "Surely our sweet children won't mind giving us all those ponies," they thought, "and besides, we don't have to ask them."

And so it went on.

But even that wasn't enough ponies for the politicians' pony trading appetites.

The Chinese politicians had plenty of ponies, and they didn't have any votes to trade them for. So the American politicians borrowed a few trillion ponies from the Chinese politicians and handed out the Chinese ponies to their American friends. The American politicians promised that American babies would grow up and work very hard to collect lots and lots of ponies to give back to the Chinese politicians.

You probably think that you can't sign contracts for ponies with the names of people not yet living. But you aren't a politician. The politician says, "Enslave the babies and the babies of the babies and the babies of the babies of the babies! Chinese ponies for everybody!" And he usually gets elected.

So what will future generations think as they toil and toil and toil to pay off our "free" ponies? "Yes, life is now very hard, but at least our ancestors had free ponies." Is that what they will think?

I doubt it.

I think we all know they'll take us for horse thieves. I guess we're counting on not being around to suffer the traditional penalty for that. Too bad. Because if we keep going on as we are, we'll deserve it.

My Full Answers to Patrick Gavin of Politico

There's this today. I have a minor quibble with the context in which my quote was presented, but it's no big deal. It's a nice, little article. These were my full answers to the questions Gavin emailed:

Did you know you were nominated?
No.

How do you feel about being on the list?
Family commitments have kept me from blogging as regularly as I'd like lately. I suppose this offers some motivation to get back into it when possible as it seems I haven't been entirely forgotten just yet.

What do you think of the #1 winner?
My young children currently dominate my time, so I'll have to admit to being unfamiliar with the work of most people on the list, including that of the winner. I've heard that her show is excellent though.

Who do you think is the hottest left wing woman?
I don't think "hotness" is a very interesting subject, but then, I'm not the target audience for these lists. Dennis Kucinich's wife is stunningly beautiful, I think.

How the Oil Industry Works

This blogger explains it to you.

Buying Your Identity

At the end of the movie Helvetica, Rick Poynor observes that through modern technology we've begun to express ourselves graphically through, for example, the layouts of our blogs and social media sites and that is an extension of other ways we express our identities like buying certain clothes or buying certain furniture and decorations for our living spaces. It reminded me of some large ads that adorned a local upscale outdoor shopping mall. The ads had a picture of a made up and bejeweled woman, and across the picture in big, bold letters it read "DEFINE YOU."

I was always repulsed by that ad.

There's the obvious repulsiveness of the idea of defining yourself by purchases in the mall, but there's more. The very idea seems like such an obvious individual and societal ill that having it used in an advertisement printed twenty feet high made it seem like the designer was throwing it in one's face. "This is who you are. You are seduced wholly by consumerism. It devours you. Now go and serve it." Or that, perhaps, the designer of the ad didn't see anything wrong with the idea.

Why have we accepted that clothing and interior design is an expression of identity? Not just part, but for many, its principal expression. Now some people see assembling an outfit or decorating a room as an art and a means to express themselves, and that is one thing, but how did these particular forms of expression become the default and expected?

What if a person wasn't interested in expressing himself that way? What if he didn't have any interest in clothes or decor? What could he wear that would indicate, "Look not here to find me"? How could he decorate his house to say, "I'm not trying to say anything about myself through this"?

One might say that many men do this. They can wear plain clothes, and they can simply leave their homes undecorated. But what about women? There's a much greater expectation on them to use dress and decor as primary modes of expression. So how does a woman indicate that those aren't her expressive avenues? How do you wear something that says nothing? I submit that if a woman attempts this, people will really think she is trying to say something!

And when we do buy things to express ourselves, are we really expressing ourselves or are we attracted to certain things, say through advertisements, that we buy and then, without thinking about it, we mold our self-conceptions to fit those things? Also how many things do we buy that are aspirational? "That mixer isn't me now, but I want to the sort of person that people would identify with this mixer."

Do we want to be defined that way? Do we want to be wandering a store thinking, "No, that clothes hamper isn't me. I'll go to that other store. It might have a hamper that I can really identify with."? Do we want to have these intense, self-defining relationships with objects?

That's not a rhetorical question. I'm interested in your answers.

ADDED: Suggested in the comments. I love this.

Pictures from the Tax Day Tea Party in Fayetteville, Arkansas

Best estimate is that about 1200 people showed up. Dick Morris came to tell the crowd that the conservative Democrat is extinct. (If I can post the audio from the video I took, I'll do that later.)

Click on any photo to enlarge it.

"Anybody but Blanche." No kidding. Well, almost anybody anyway...





Went up high to try and get better shots of the crowd but could only get this little section near the front because of the trees.


Heh:

I liked this sign a lot, but this was the only shot I got of it:

Morris left in this car. Another "heh."

Let's hope so:

Worthwhile Listening 3

American Rhetoric, the site I've been linking to for these speeches, has this speech at number one. The choice is obvious. Everyone knows this speech. The title has become a common cliché.

However, have you listened to it in its entirety during your adult life? (I specify adult life because some vague memory of it from back in grade school is not the same thing.) There are the parts we hear all the time in audio snippets, but the rest of it is just as good. I've listened to it more than any other speech on my MP3 player.

The man was a master of the metaphor and simile. The skill of his delivery is equaled only by Reagan, and even then, it is not exceeded. I also like how precise this speech is. It is very tight, and by that I mean that King deftly slices off any shoots of misguided thought that he anticipates may sprout from his words in the listener's mind.

And look at this bit:

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

Good advice for all of us even now.

Don't miss the rest of it.

More Worthwhile Listening

If you find yourself feeling like the republic is headed down the road to serfdom, listen to this. That's not to say that we're not on that road, but imagine hearing that speech from a President today.

It [the Constitution] has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations. And it is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly equal, wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But, in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis -- broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

For the trust reposed in me, I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.

I am happy that we are not so foregone today that a President would be comfortable giving that same speech. At least, that is, I do not think a modern President would be comfortable giving it.

Happy Birthday, Kiddo

The big three. Incidentally, the best three years of our lives. Thanks for that!

Where You'll Find Me Today

Here at 2:00 PM CST on Dylan Ferrell's show. You can watch online.

Heh.

Almost Four Years

This blog is almost four years old. So was the picture on the sidebar. No more. I replaced it with a picture from today. New picture, older me.

Worthwhile Listening

I've been listening to speeches during my thrice weekly run on the treadmill. I think I'll start linking one each Monday.

First, a classic.

Free audio, video, and transcript available at the link. A taste:

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down: [up] man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.

...

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.

...

Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the -- or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.

Don't miss the rest of it. It's all that good.