Jon Stewart, just now:
We’ve been given a false choice between tyranny and anarchy.
Hey! When was I offered that choice?
10 Responses to I Must Have Missed It
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Everybody comfy? Good. | Pittsburgh Alpha to Omega -
April 23, 2010
[…] Via Roderick Long’s blog, […]
It was one of those “you have a choice… now! [1/2 second later] Oops missed it. Guess you’ll have to be satisfied with tyranny” type deals.
Or one of those, “there isn’t a strict dichotomy; think of it as a continuum-type deals.”
I wish!
You weren’t give it. WE were.
You didn’t miss it. Like the man said, it was a false choice.
Or you could imagine the body politic as a person with rights as Roderick has done in the past to justify certain forms of public property. In that interpretation, “we” as in the entire nation was given the choice, but since the nation is incapacitated now similar to a schizophrenic patient the choice was made for us!
I assume that’s a reference to this piece, but if so, you’re misremembering it. I have never described the body politic as a person — first, because I don’t believe in any such thing as a “body politic,” and second, because I do not believe any collective is a person. I do think a public has property rights, but its having them is simply a matter of the individudals within it having rights as members of the public (such rights being consequent to their having collectively rather than individually homesteaded something).
False choice? It looks to me like the real choice, concisely stated.
Another priceless quote: “Why not try competent government intervention, just to throw it out there? Because everybody’s comfortable with them running the military.”