Its Hump Day already!

I didnt realize this past Sunday was the first day of summer. But, of course, as its sunny and hot here year-round, I lose track of these things.

Of course, its the time you want to take off and not go back to work, especially if you had a sweet gig going on. Like getting paid not to work

• If you pay people to stay home, theyll stay home.
• If they stay home and get paid for doing nothing, theyll rebel when the program ends.
• None of this should surprise us, but weve got some great writers who spelled it out for us decades ago.

Indiana Rebels!

America, Before Bismarck

Copying Bismarck Was a Mistake

The modern welfare state is often viewed as originating in Imperial Germany in the 1880s, when the Iron Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, established compulsory accident, sickness, and old-age insurance for workers. Bismarck was no altruist. He intended his social programs to divert workingmen from revolutionary socialism and to purchase their loyalty to the Kaiser's regime; to a large extent he seems to have achieved his objectives.

The whole of society without exception reached the point of demanding security. Security has to be paid for. It is for that reason that we are today the participants in what the old writers called a pactum subjectionis, by which men surrender to the state their individual rights in consideration for the social rights received back from it.

The essential psychological characteristic of our age is the predominance of fear over self-confidence. The worker is afraid of unemployment and of having nothing saved for old age. His demand is for what is nowadays called social security.

Everyone of every class tries to rest his individual existence on the bosom of the state and tends to regard the state as the universal provider.

And finally:

The new rights of man from FDR are given out as coming to complete those already proclaimed in the eighteenth century. But the least reflection is sufficient to show that in fact they contradict and abrogate them.

The old ones, in decreeing liberty, made each man the sole master of his own actions; the state could not guarantee their consequences, which had to be borne by the individual alone.

Whereas, on the other hand, if the state is to guarantee to a man what the consequences of his actions shall be, it must take control of his activities.

In the first case, a man is thought of as an adult, he is freed from tutelage and left to face the risks of life himself.

Whereas, in the second, the purpose is to keep him out of the way of risks; he is treated as an incapable person and put in leading strings.

The conclusion is, then, that the promises of today in fact close the cycle that was opened by the declarations of independence of earlier days. The liberty then given is taken back in exchange for a security that is desired by all.

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