Fairy Tales Can Be Deadly

In the late 18th century a professor named Alexander Tyler made the following observation regarding the life cycle of social cultures:

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been
200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence-
From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great
courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from
dependency back into bondage.

The fairy tale which so often subverts civilizations from sustaining some form of prosperous and free existence is the dual seduction of Collectivist Gain coupled with Irresponsible Behavior. The success that liberty and abundance brings fuels the tendency among some citizens to imagine ways they can obtain further riches without due effort, by orchestrating various government-directed arrangements. Thus, the virtue of individual, self-initiated merit is sacrificed upon the altar of what Frederick Bastiat calls “legalized plunder.”

Enter the Welfare State! In our Western Civilization, beginning earnestly in the early 20th century, we started down a path called “The Road to Serfdom” by acclaimed economist F. A. Hayek. This Socialistic tendency to reshape the world according to one’s wishes apart from certain economic realities was also called “The Fatal Conceit,” by Hayek. It’s a selfish lust to advance beyond one’s qualifications of legitimate, economic success and acquire rewards, or spoils, through political means.

This selfish temptation to arrange a system where others are made to provide for one’s well-being is the very prescription of apathetic dependency that will take a society right back into bondage per Tyler’s warning.

Celebrated journalist and author Mark Steyn calls this love affair with the Welfare State the “suicide of the West.” His basic thesis is this: we will lose the will to fight for our freedoms as a natural consequence of our conceited addiction to various collectivist entitlements. The more we become dependent upon government wealth transfers for our well-being, the more we will forget the survival instinct we need as individuals to stand-up to the ever-present, natural threats around us. Among these threats is the current Islamic Fascism that’s working to establish a new, global Caliphate. Declining birth rates, in Europe particularly, is assisting in this growing, internal weakness. The various Welfare Programs in Europe are unsustainable at their current rate. The extensive State “give-aways” are such that there won’t be enough workers paying into the system to keep it solvent in the years to come. Sound familiar? It should. To confront this growing actuarial problem, Germany has just announced a dubious program to start paying Germans to have babies!

In America, with the Liberals taking over Congress, we soon will be facing a whole host of new, European-styled, entitlement proposals that will simply put us farther down the road toward eventual bondage. The Liberal Agenda of tax, spend, regulate and appease our enemies, amounts to a wholesale capitulation of the virtues of self-reliance and personal responsibility. What will be delivered in its wake is a pitiful dependency from which there’s no escape. This stands in stark contrast to the Lincoln maxim of not doing for a man what he could and should do for himself. There remains- no Collective means to Individual success.

Alexander Tyler is also noted for another quote:

A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.
It can exist only until the voters discover that they can vote
themselves largesse form the public treasury. From that moment
on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the
most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a
Democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always
followed by a Dictatorship.

As abolitionist Wendell Phillips explained it- “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” The vigilance must be for the virtues of a Republic, not the whims of a Democracy. And in that organization of a republic, it is the individual’s virtue that guarantees our liberty through the dedicated, spiritual faith in Duty over Benefit.

It was Kennedy who said, “ask not what your Country can do for you, but what you can do for your Country!” Becoming apathetic about our faithful commitment regarding Individualism amounts to a slow, but sure, death. Ben Franklin described it this way, “he who exchanges his [individual] liberty for a little bit of [social] security, deserves neither.” He knew just how dangerous Liberal Fairy Tales could be. He told the lady outside Independence Hall- “We’ve given you a Republic- IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.” It’s been said, “a young man who’s not a liberal has no heart, but an old man who’s not a conservative has no brain!” Fairy Tales, after all, are nothing more than an emotional luxury for the young. They have no real place in the world of grown-ups. (send comments to WFC83197@aol.com)