Would You Like My Biscuit?

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"Listening to Barack Obama right now on CNN helps me to better understand why so many of my good and honest “liberal” friends cannot see through his rhetoric and make the break. He is an incredible orator with fantastic speech writers and has mastered the “Orwellian” double-speak. Absolutely incredible how his wonderful words have nothing to do with the truth."

— Daymon J. Hartley via Facebook (via eltigrechico)

(Source: fuckyeahmarxismleninism, via eltigrechico)

May 23, 2013

136 notes

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Beginning in the late eighteenth century, friendly societies arose to address the needs of a growing population. As the Industrial Revolution created new markets and new wealth, it also saw the advent of organizations designed to solve myriad social problems and form the ties of true community. Self-governing “friendly societies,” both in Great Britain and America, developed spontaneously, providing mutual aid and welfare services without government support or involvement.

It’s difficult to imagine today just how these aid societies flourished. By the late nineteenth century, membership had expanded to include millions, cutting across all racial and ethnic divisions. These voluntary, self-funded associations provided all manner of social welfare services, including death benefits, old-age homes, orphanages, healthcare, and savings for retirement and disability—just to name a few. Moreover, friendly societies were able to achieve their mission without the moral hazard endemic to the current welfare state (in which benefits are dispensed to recipients based on static income formulas rather than considerations about circumstances).

With mutual-aid societies, membership was contingent on adhering to generally accepted codes of behavior, with aid provided to members who fell upon hard times through no fault of their own, such as an unavoidable job loss, injury, or prolonged illness. Wife-beaters and the chronically lazy were often expelled, or not admitted in the first place.

Consequently, with friendly societies and their derivatives dominating the provision of social welfare services, the demand for welfare by public and private charities was miniscule compared to today. According to one of the book’s contributors, David Beito, in 1930 “less than 4 percent of New York’s aged depended on either public or private charity.”

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— After the Welfare State (via thefreelioness)

May 20, 2013

16 notes

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"You mean the generation that paid three times as much for college to enter a job market with triple the unemployment isn’t interested in purchasing the assets of the generation who just blew an enormous housing bubble and kept it from popping through quantitative easing and out-and-out federal support? Curious."

—

When comments are better than the article, Atlantic edition (“The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials arent’ buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy”)

Every time someone says we’re a lazy and entitled generation I’m going to show them this

They should be happy most of us haven’t moved to the moon yet

That actually sounds like a good idea at this point

(via setfabulazerstomaximumcaptain)

(Source: bostonreview, via eltigrechico)

May 15, 2013

26,743 notes

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Let's Not Choose Slavery

“Slavery was a good life, if you had a good master. Just eat and sleep and play and take care of a small part of the farm.”

This was Dan Hughes speaking in Louisville at the age of 112. He knew his subject; he was a slave in Crittenden County, Kentucky, when the Civil War ended. To a generation which has grown up with the bloodhounds-and blacksnakes concept of the slavery era in America, his words have a strange sound. They shouldn’t. There are thousands of persons in this country today, of all races, who believe that slavery is a good life—if you have a good master.

When Dan Hughes was a slave with a good master, he had security. His parents had no worry for the future when he was born. Such training as he received in his youth—and it was equal to the education received in those days by many free men—was provided without cost to him by his benevolent “owner.” He looked forward to guaranteed full employment during his productive life, and to an old age free of economic worries.

Dan Hughes, the slave, had subsidized housing and guaranteed medical care. He had incentive, too; if things had gone on as they were he might have become a straw boss or even a butler up at the big house. And if he planted what he was told to plant on the small part of the farm he took care of, well—try planting wheat today without being told you can plant it.

The security Old Dan had in those days, he couldn’t have had without slavery. We cannot have it today without slavery. Guaranteed food and housing and medical care, assured full employment and carefree old age, surety against economic depression and protection against price-cutting competition, these are the fruits of security—and the attributes of slavery. It makes little difference whether a person or a government is the master.

The more Americans call upon government for cradle-to-grave security, the more they ask politicians for guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, guaranteed living, the closer they come to placing themselves in slavery. Some say the difference is that we choose our masters; they forget that the more freedom we surrender elsewhere, the nearer we come to losing the right of choice. Others say government is a good master; they forget that when slavery is established, masters can change.

We think that for all the security of slavery, Dan Hughes must have preferred freedom with its risks. So do we. So, we believe, does a great majority of the American people. To “eat and sleep and play and take care of a small part of the farm” isn’t enough for the human soul. Our task today is to see that we do not drift through complacence into a bondage we would not knowingly accept. When government promises security, let us look for the chains before we accept.