Yes, We Can!by
Michael Tennant
A perhaps not terribly impressed reader of one of my recent LRC blog posts, in which I linked to an article explaining that forced in-home vaccinations could be a result of President Obama’s health care "reform" bill, wrote: "Why do you guys on LRC report stuff like this? There is nothing anybody can do about it and you propose no plan of action yourself. Is it just to invoke fear or to irritate people? I just don’t get it. And please don’t give me ol’ – ‘well, if enough people know about it and stand up....’ – Hasn’t happened yet, ain’t gonna’ happen anytime soon..." Despite the tone of my interlocutor’s correspondence, he did ask a valid question, the answer to which deserves some consideration. Here is the reply I sent him:
Well, at least I hope that’s what I’ve done here. Sometimes it does seem as if our efforts are in vain, and it’s easy to become fatalistic about the prospects for liberty, especially in the age of Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama (and Clinton again!). Yet who would have thought that chattel slavery, an institution that had existed from time immemorial, would be (at least in the West) effectively wiped out, and mostly in a peaceful manner, within the span of a century? Though abolition took place via state action, it would not have happened if not for philosophers, ministers, and others who laid the foundation for it in the minds and hearts of ordinary people, who then brought pressure to bear on their political leaders, who had themselves been prepared by the very same thinkers to do the heretofore unthinkable. Much of the preparation for slavery’s abolition involved describing its horrors to those who either were unaware of them or had deliberately chosen to ignore them – most of whom, in view of the fact that they did not own slaves, were largely incapable of affecting the way slaves were treated, let alone their condition of servitude. Nevertheless, they needed to be made aware of the evils of the institution so that they might conclude its abolition was necessary. In the same way, while libertarians’ continual drawing attention to the evils perpetrated by the state may seem at times to be a waste of effort given that the state in general continues to grow apace, the suspicion of the state that we are sowing in people’s hearts and minds may someday ultimately flower into a movement to abolish the state or at least severely restrain it. None of us writing for LRC today may live to see it. Mises and Rothbard, both great critics of central banking, didn’t live to see the day when the Federal Reserve would become increasingly an object of scorn rather than reverence among the general population and its abolition a somewhat remote but nevertheless real possibility; yet it is undeniable that the ideas that they promoted, carried forward and built on by Lew Rockwell, Ron Paul, and others, have brought us to this very point in history. The unthinkable during the early Austrians’ lifetimes has become the thinkable and the possible during ours. Similarly, while those of us writing for LRC today may never witness the downfall of the state, by providing example after example of its depredations and supplying an alternative view of society without the heavy hand of government we are performing the groundwork for just such an eventuality. We’ll leave it to future historians to give us our due; and even if they don’t, the important thing is that liberty was extended, regardless of who gets the credit for it. Well, I may not have inspired you, dear reader, but I’ve inspired myself pretty well – and coming from a natural pessimist, that’s really saying something. To borrow from the entrepreneur Bob the Builder rather than some hack politician: Can we fix it (i.e., lead the way to liberty)? Yes, we can! July 22, 2009 Michael Tennant [send him mail] is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
|
