Hope is finding out that America is reading some solid books: Five of the top twenty are conservative books, promoting freedom and the way of the origin of this country.I got my copy of Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny, which as of yesterday had a printing of 512,000 - and that's just two days into its publication. I bought my four oldest children their own copy as well. I quoted Levin's quote of Lincoln from the back of the book the other day, which is also the source of its title. Here's another quote, this time Levin himself, describing this country's founding principles: A free people living in a civil society, working in self-interested cooperation, and a government operating within the limits of its authority promote more prosperity, opportunity, and happiness for more people than any alternative. I love that... "self-interested cooperation." It's a terrific picture of how people can respect each other's property and work with one another, and how government, properly positioned in the background of society, can partner with the free individual to work for the individual's pursuit of happiness. Not by interference or intervention, but by wisely limiting itself to self-restrained authority.Government doesn't have to be evil, but when it overreaches and when it encroaches on the freedom of the civil individual, then its politicians become tyrants and government is no longer a partner for prosperity, but an adversary to be fought. And that is what we have today. And that is precisely why America immerses itself in re-learning the principles of freedom and capitalist productivity. It is that roused self-interest that gives me hope - not the false hope of a managed society centered on the leadership of one man. Such false hopes are childish, naive, and - for the power they bestow upon such leadership - dangerous. Get informed, and then get busy.  |
