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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] It need not be so
  • Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:43:28 -0700



last two paragraphs from
http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/wolfemountains.html


Sam Rayburn, a politician of vast experience, once said that all
legislation is special-interest legislation. Of our nation, and of the 20th
century, that is unquestionably true; but it need not be. We have -- but do
not need -- a pestilent swarm of exceedingly clever persons who call
themselves public servants when everything about them and us proclaims that
they are in fact our masters. They make laws (and regulations and judicial
decisions that have the force of laws) faster and more assiduously than any
factory in the world makes chains; and they lay them on us.

It need not be so. We might have a society in which the laws were few and
just, simple, permanent, and familiar to everyone -- a society in which
everyone stood shoulder-to-shoulder because everyone lived by the same
changeless rules, and everyone knew what those rules were. When we had it,
we would also have a society in which the lack of wealth was not reason for
resentment but a spur to ambition, and in which wealth was not a cause for
self-indulgence but a call to service. We had it once, and some time in
this third millennium we shall have it again; and if we forget to thank
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien for it when we get it, we will already have begun
the slow and not always unpleasant return to Mordor. Freedom, love of
neighbour, and personal responsibility are steep slopes; he could not climb
them for us -- we must do that ourselves. But he has shown us the road and
the reward.
-------------

see also
http://www.lastwizards.com/pages/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4

paul tradingpost@gilanet.com
http://largocreekfarms.com
http://medicinehill.net






  • [Livingontheland] It need not be so, Tradingpost, 03/08/2005

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