I came across three articles yesterday that explain the task before the John Locke Foundation and other seekers of truth and freedom. First, P.J. O’Rourke explains how conservatives blew it.
What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That’s not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. “Jeeze, 230 pounds!” But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters–all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs–think so too.
Mark Steyn at National Review Online channels Bastiat, de Tocqueville, and Henninger:
By 2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny state. That is the death of the American idea ? which, after all, began as an economic argument: ?No taxation without representation” is a great rallying cry. ?No representation without taxation? has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it’s unsustainable and you’ve got to give some of it back?
Claudia Rosett, writing for Forbes, makes the case that “But if America is to remain a great nation, what must somehow be restored as the centerpiece of the nation’s goals is not collective “change,” but individual liberty.”
