Many people claim to love freedom, but few of them think they could actually handle it, were they to live in a truly free society. Thus, they lobby their governments, ceaselessly, for all manner of subsidies and favors at their fellow taxpayers’ expense.
The pattern is ubiquitous but perhaps easiest to detect after a tyranny collapses, whether due to wartime defeat (such as Nazi Germany) or internal implosion (such as the Soviet Union). What arises from the ashes of the all-powerful police state is not a truly free society, but rather a less obtrusive police state, a sort of Tyranny Light whose usurpations worsen with the years.
“Most people are content as long as they enjoy creature comforts, ample entertainment, and the illusion that the rulers are protecting them from real and imagined dangers,” writes Robert Higgs. “They would rather go to the mall than the barricades.”
“Robert Higgs’s systematic analysis of the political uses of fear-mongering is in his book Neither Liberty nor Safety. The cancerous growth of the modern ‘guardian’ state—uncontrolled by a ‘higher power’—is our generation’s legacy: future generations will have to control it, submit to it, or escape from it.”
[Clipped from a posting by the Independent Institute’s “The Lighthouse.”