Hayek's The Road to Serfdom

"Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the "citizen" by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn't happen here because Americans aren't Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek's greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: "There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought," he wrote with an immigrant's eye on the Britain of 1944. "It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority."


Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from "independence and self-reliance" (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to "a healthy suspicion of power and authority" -- the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government "do something," the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That's what happened in Britain."
 
Excerpted from Mark Steyn's column here.

Old, but interesting...

This is very old news that you'll probably remember. I never saw this Greg Gutfeld piece though and thought it was pretty good. It addresses MSNBC's creation of narratives.

Gutfeld, as you might know, is a comedian/social commentator who was (is?) writer/editor of magazines such as Men's Health and MaximUK, contributor at the Huffington Post, and hosts a late-night comedic talk show on FoxNews.

This is the section from his FoxNews show where he offers a brief monologue on any given topic.