Curtis Dahlgren
"Equality," Freedom, and the Pope (he said WHAT?)
By Curtis Dahlgren
"Whenever a film's credits contain the words 'Inspired by Actual Events' you can rest assured that what you are about to see is a baldfaced lie . . But 2014 was a banner year for falsehood on the big screen." – Wall Street Journal, 1/3/15 (humorist Joe Queenan); "Lies, Damned Lies and Hollywood"
IF WE CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE HOLLYWOOD, WHO CAN WE TRUST? The editorial page "we"? Scientific "consensus"? Your brother-in-law? Your professor? Your own pastor?
Just for the record, I want it noted that I agreed with the Pope when he said that: " . . it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exists among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition . . .
"[E]very man has by nature the right to possess property as his own . . . it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only things that perish in use, but those also which, though they have been reduced into use, continue for further use . . . "
YES, the Pope said that, although we weren't around when he published that encyclical – in 1891 (Pope Leo XIII, 1810-1903). The last quarter of the 1800s got hammered by the "socialist" propagandists, and my paternal grandfather was a passionate polemicist on the other side of the arguments. And when the Pope speaks, I listen (if he's right)! On behalf of my grandpa, I'd like to post a few remarks more:
- "The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." – William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
- "Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." – Alexis de Tocqueville
- "The Left is more interested in redistributing wealth than in creating it. This should have been as obvious to Americans as the sun. Finally, Americans are coming to realize that the Left's goal is now, as it's always been, equality, not prosperity." – Dennis Prager
To point out the obvious, when a movement is obsessed with a phony "equality" over prosperity's expansion, it ends up getting neither. As the book of Job puts it, "The thing they feared the most is come upon them." Leaders of the movement often know that end from the outset; they're only in it for the power in the first place. Socialists used to be called "levellers." Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once said:
"Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves."
That's never been "truer" than today, if it's possible to be "truer"! The ruling "levellers" don't mind the demagoguery of the "equality" gambit, for these are the same people who dumb education down and import as many illegal aliens as possible so as to maintain a permanent underclass. Half of the underclass may be undereducated worker bees, while the other class consists simply of totally-dependent serfs. Either way, they are kept in "restraint and servitude" as Tocqueville so accurately predicted. The demagogues are as happy as clams as long as they can play the parasite game. If you wonder what I'm talking about, just think "last six years"!
CONCLUSION
Cowper once said that it is "a strange thing to acquire power and to lose Liberty." Art Linkletter used to say, "People are funny." And if our Founding Fathers were "right on" about anything, it was human nature! The main "equality" that concerned them was the equality of the three branches of the federal government! They had studied history, as had Edward Gibbon:
"The principles of a free Constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive." [or vice versa]
John Adams argued that one of the legislative bodies ought to be composed of the wealthy [only] to protect the wealthy from the "plundering majority." Jefferson argued that to give the elites "power in order to prevent them from doing mischief is arming them for it" [today's elites are the Ivy League-like educated, with or without inherited wealth]. And they have too much power.
Barry Goldwater warned that the ever-growing bureaucracy was the first sign of a coming tyranny. He said that if "the wrong man" were elected President, we could find ourselves in a dictatorship almost overnight. And his enemies said that we ever elected a Barry, terrible things would happen to us and the world. BUT WOULD ANYONE NOTICE?
P.S. Pope Leo XIII wrote about responsibility well as the right to own property:
"Private ownership . . is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary . . . Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings . . has received them for a purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God's providence, for the benefit of others."
Goethe said, "A useless life is an early death." Speaking of Hollywood, here's some good advice with which to conclude today – and this comes from over 2,500 years ago (Aesop's Fables):
"It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds." [integrity helps, Hollywood]
PPS: Are the global warming promoters scientists or political scientists? People froze their butts off on Earth Day this year. Da Prez had to go all the way to da Everglades to find some global warming, eh? I wore my winter coat to town today.
Speaking of "Inspired by actual events," more to come next week.
© Curtis Dahlgren
April 24, 2015
"Whenever a film's credits contain the words 'Inspired by Actual Events' you can rest assured that what you are about to see is a baldfaced lie . . But 2014 was a banner year for falsehood on the big screen." – Wall Street Journal, 1/3/15 (humorist Joe Queenan); "Lies, Damned Lies and Hollywood"
IF WE CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE HOLLYWOOD, WHO CAN WE TRUST? The editorial page "we"? Scientific "consensus"? Your brother-in-law? Your professor? Your own pastor?
Just for the record, I want it noted that I agreed with the Pope when he said that: " . . it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exists among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition . . .
"[E]very man has by nature the right to possess property as his own . . . it must be within his right to possess things not merely for temporary and momentary use, as other living things do, but to have and to hold them in stable and permanent possession; he must have not only things that perish in use, but those also which, though they have been reduced into use, continue for further use . . . "
YES, the Pope said that, although we weren't around when he published that encyclical – in 1891 (Pope Leo XIII, 1810-1903). The last quarter of the 1800s got hammered by the "socialist" propagandists, and my paternal grandfather was a passionate polemicist on the other side of the arguments. And when the Pope speaks, I listen (if he's right)! On behalf of my grandpa, I'd like to post a few remarks more:
- "The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." – William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
- "Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." – Alexis de Tocqueville
- "The Left is more interested in redistributing wealth than in creating it. This should have been as obvious to Americans as the sun. Finally, Americans are coming to realize that the Left's goal is now, as it's always been, equality, not prosperity." – Dennis Prager
To point out the obvious, when a movement is obsessed with a phony "equality" over prosperity's expansion, it ends up getting neither. As the book of Job puts it, "The thing they feared the most is come upon them." Leaders of the movement often know that end from the outset; they're only in it for the power in the first place. Socialists used to be called "levellers." Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once said:
"Your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves."
That's never been "truer" than today, if it's possible to be "truer"! The ruling "levellers" don't mind the demagoguery of the "equality" gambit, for these are the same people who dumb education down and import as many illegal aliens as possible so as to maintain a permanent underclass. Half of the underclass may be undereducated worker bees, while the other class consists simply of totally-dependent serfs. Either way, they are kept in "restraint and servitude" as Tocqueville so accurately predicted. The demagogues are as happy as clams as long as they can play the parasite game. If you wonder what I'm talking about, just think "last six years"!
CONCLUSION
Cowper once said that it is "a strange thing to acquire power and to lose Liberty." Art Linkletter used to say, "People are funny." And if our Founding Fathers were "right on" about anything, it was human nature! The main "equality" that concerned them was the equality of the three branches of the federal government! They had studied history, as had Edward Gibbon:
"The principles of a free Constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive." [or vice versa]
John Adams argued that one of the legislative bodies ought to be composed of the wealthy [only] to protect the wealthy from the "plundering majority." Jefferson argued that to give the elites "power in order to prevent them from doing mischief is arming them for it" [today's elites are the Ivy League-like educated, with or without inherited wealth]. And they have too much power.
Barry Goldwater warned that the ever-growing bureaucracy was the first sign of a coming tyranny. He said that if "the wrong man" were elected President, we could find ourselves in a dictatorship almost overnight. And his enemies said that we ever elected a Barry, terrible things would happen to us and the world. BUT WOULD ANYONE NOTICE?
P.S. Pope Leo XIII wrote about responsibility well as the right to own property:
"Private ownership . . is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary . . . Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings . . has received them for a purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God's providence, for the benefit of others."
Goethe said, "A useless life is an early death." Speaking of Hollywood, here's some good advice with which to conclude today – and this comes from over 2,500 years ago (Aesop's Fables):
"It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds." [integrity helps, Hollywood]
PPS: Are the global warming promoters scientists or political scientists? People froze their butts off on Earth Day this year. Da Prez had to go all the way to da Everglades to find some global warming, eh? I wore my winter coat to town today.
Speaking of "Inspired by actual events," more to come next week.
© Curtis Dahlgren
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