How often do you read something that is so moving you want to cry, you want to shove it into the hands of everyone you know, hell, into the hands of strangers in the street?

Please read this. Essay by Mark Steyn, “Live Free or Die.”

Steyn’s got it all. First class intellect, international breadth of cultural & political perspective, wit, sharp eye.

Excepts. These are all quotes. “Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.”:

  • Indolence, as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a republic.
  • So-called fiscal conservatives often miss the point. The problem isn’t the cost. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover them each month. They’re wrong because they deform the relationship between the citizen and the state.
  • There are stages to the enervation of free peoples. America, which held out against the trend, is now at Stage One: The benign paternalist state promises to make all those worries about mortgages, debt, and health care disappear.
  • Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That’s the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a “health audit” of the contents of your refrigerator.
  • When the state “gives” you plenty—when it takes care of your health, takes cares of your kids, takes care of your elderly parents, takes care of every primary responsibility of adulthood—it’s not surprising that the citizenry cease to function as adults: Life becomes a kind of extended adolescence . . .
  • Every Democrat running for election tells you they want to do this or that “for the children.” If America really wanted to do something “for the children,” it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a leviathan of bloated bureaucracy and unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. That’s the real “war on children” (to use another Democrat catchphrase)—and every time you bulk up the budget you make it less and less likely they’ll win it.
  • The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher—and you make it very difficult ever to change back.

Everything he writes, I feel in my bones. Truly, I am so distressed by the direction our government is taking that I can only look at it peripherally — to look straight on would distress me to madness.

I love this country so much. I look at my life, at what I’ve accomplished — when else in history, where else on the planet, could a woman live the life I’m living? No other time in history. And as for “where,” the answer is this country, my country, America. A few other Western countries come close, possibly. But none of them with the space, the possibilities, & wealth of this country.

And we’re frittering it away, because we want our government to baby us. Because when we are faced with life’s sharp edges, we choose to be timid and fretful and whine for help instead of saying “we’ll get through it. We’ll figure out a way. We’re strong.” And meaning it. And taking pride in it. Pride!

Is this what the Dem party supporters wanted? A government that plays to our weakness? That grows, and grows, and taxes, and taxes, promises to solve our little problems, assumes more & more control in the name of solving them — tell me, you people who voted for Obama, are you getting what you wanted? Is this what you wanted? Is it?

Are you happy?

Do you really think we have a Caring Man in the White House now and that’s going to make everything better, give him time, it’s not his fault he inherited such a mess? I assume that’s what left-leaning intellectuals would claim, am I right? Do you really, honestly believe that? That the changes he’s making to our country are all benign, their consequences will be neutral at worst, that they are credible, that it’s all about patching and fixing? That the politicians running our government — those same politicians you would agree as individuals are idiots — are somehow, collectively, qualified to do the patching and fixing?

Before the election an interview Obama gave on Chicago public radio in 2001 surfaced. I never linked to it, but I’ll embed it below; here also is a transcription I made of the relevant bits. Our future president speaking, folks. Read it closely, please, pay attention, please.

You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and, sort of, of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in the society.

And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted — and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way — that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you. But it doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And, um, in some ways we still suffer from that.

We elected this man. We elected him to uphold our Constitution — without ever ONCE looking at what he plans for our Constitution.

The entire pre-election debate was about namby pamby crap. Petty sh!t. Not once did we discuss what is really important.

But as Steyn’s essay asserts, there are consequences when people expect governments to do things “on their behalf,” as opposed to operating in terms of those negative liberties, in terms of what its limits are relative to its citizens.

The left looked at the future under Republican rule and saw a militaristic America alienating other nations and promulgating racism.

Bad stuff. I agree we don’t want to go there.

But are we really on a better path?

No, we are not. We’re on a path to ruin. Maybe on a different route than the GOP would take us, but the destination is the same.

Steyn, again:

Americans face a choice: They can rediscover the animating principles of the American idea — of limited government, a self-reliant citizenry, and the opportunities to exploit your talents to the fullest — or they can join most of the rest of the Western world in terminal decline. To rekindle the spark of liberty once it dies is very difficult. The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it’s subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

But not to worry. In fact: sleep in. Spend your life in bed, it’s so comfortable! reading, watching T.V., surfing the net.

Genteel decline can be very agreeable—initially: You still have terrific restaurants, beautiful buildings, a great opera house. And once the pressure’s off it’s nice to linger at the sidewalk table, have a second café au lait and a pain au chocolat, and watch the world go by.

You don’t even have to roust yourself to attend those anti-war rallies any more! Now that Chimpy’s out of office! Niiiice!

So go ahead, have a glass of wine, a glass of beer, go back to bed, such a nice man in charge now, and those fools called him a Socialist! Go back to bed.