Thursday, December 08, 2005

15:24.

From C.S. Lewis in Willing Slaves Of The Welfare State (1958)

"I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has the "freeborn mind". But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing.

For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.

Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land.

Who will talk like that when the State is everyone' schoolmaster and employer?

Admittedly, when a man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none."

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