House of Eratosthenes

Just a fine piece of writin’, with some observations that really make you think. Especially as your yard-ape moseys out the door to his first day of school, be it public or private, in a few weeks…it’s got about six weeks of dust on it but it’s well worth pondering, whether you’re in the eighth grade on in your eighth decade.

Nowhere have we seen such an accelerating atrophy of our freedom as in K-12 public schools where recent decades have witnessed far more books banned, and not some print version of Debbie Does Dallas. No, literary classics like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn are verboten — required reading in those decadent days of my ’70s high school. But educrats with the backbone of a large worm now avoid anything controversial.
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So many laws have eroded our Second Amendment gun rights that, as P.J. O’Rourke notes, if Massachusetts had the same gun laws in 1775 that it has now, we’d all be Canadians.

Even political campaign speech is constricted. The Obama administration argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the McCain-Feingold Act can ban books about ongoing election campaigns. Yet Justice Hugo Black warned that:

The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate, or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.

Almost half of all U.S. income is taxed today which means we’ve lost about half our economic freedom. With record government spending and soaring debt, we’re set to lose a lot more. And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea.

Government regulations on business cost us well over $1 trillion a year in higher consumer prices, and there are exactly 26,911 government words policing the sale of a head of cabbage.
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We also have endless media-savvy professional grievance groups contending that every erosion of freedom is imperative for our safety. But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned:

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

How does this start? It starts with a lazy intellect that believes one more rule can always solve everything.

The summer heat in Sacramento tops out at around 110. You can beat it by galavanting off some hundred miles East or West, to spend your weekend up in the mountains or down in the surf. But if you want to do right by your home city’s efforts to become a fun place and not California’s belly-button of drudge and debt — we have the river. With rafting. Get out of your air conditioned cocoon, expose your kids to the great outdoors the way the Good Lord intended, and have ’em assault each other with water cannons so they don’t grow up to be pussies.

Ah, but there’s a problem. Hooligans have been drinking, horsing around, bringing harm to themselves and others, and littering. What to do?

Sensible answer: Cite them for disorderly conduct. With escalating fines for repeated offenses. Punishment based on individual identity.

Bureaucrat answer: Ya kiddin’? Blah blah blah budget cuts blah blah blah police manpower. Yard-duty teacher mentality. If I make one exception I’ll have to make a thousand. It’s a shame we all have to go without something because of the bad behavior of just a few…but…that’s the way life is.

We’re taught that from the first grade onward. Our parents allow us to learn that, and then we allow our kids to learn it, and we mistakenly think of that as the glue that holds a “civilized” society together, rather than recognizing it as the anti-American toxic sludge that it is.

We think of this as the only way a people can be properly governed. There is some truth in that; it’s the only way sensible rules can be enforced, by a bureaucracy starved for quality thinking and starved for cash. Financially strapped because the tax base is wilting, dying on the vine. Starving to death because all the businesses are leaving. Because once it’s Saturday morning, everyone’s left town so they can be someplace they want to be. Where they can do things they want to do.

In Sacramento on a Friday afternoon, the freeways are clogged. People get the hell out of dodge, exactly the way schoolkids get out of school when that dismissal bell rings every day. For the same reason. So you see, the financial straits about which we hear so much, so often…and freedom…they’re connected. They are not separate issues.

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- Webloggin » Braveheart Wept | 07/19/2009 @ 11:57
And to think the Boston Tea Party was waged over a three-cent-a-pound tax on tea.

Not sure I’d agree with that exactly, but, close enough.
The whole- Gum’mint intrusion, and “auto collection” of taxes, via. payroll, to finance it– bit might play a bit better.
So might the “New Dred Scott”, where white males born in the US are not considered automatically eligible for civil rights.
See: Philly fire department, VAWA II, Supreme Court appointment “debate”, mandatory K-12, mandatory “registration”, “Family” court rules.

I could be wrong.
- CaptDMO | 07/19/2009 @ 20:21

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Braveheart WeptSunday, July 19th, 2009

Braveheart Wept
Sunday, July 19th, 2009