If you cannot tolerate imperfections, be prepared to kiss your freedom goodbye.
By Thomas Sowell
August 04, 2009
‘Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” We have heard that many times. What is also the price of freedom is the toleration of imperfections. If everything that is wrong with the world becomes a reason to turn more power over to some political savior, then freedom is going to erode away, while we are mindlessly repeating the catchwords of the hour, whether “change,” “universal health care,” or “social justice.”
If we can be so easily stampeded by rhetoric that neither the public nor Congress bothers to read (much less analyze) bills that make massive changes in medical care, then do not be surprised when life-and-death decisions about you or your family are taken out of your hands — and out of the hands of your doctor — and transferred to bureaucrats in Washington.
Let’s go back to square one. The universe was not made to our specifications. Nor were human beings. So there is nothing surprising in the fact that we are dissatisfied with many things at many times. The big question is whether we are prepared to follow any politician who claims to be able to “solve” our “problem.”
If we are, then there will be a never ending series of “solutions,” each causing new problems calling for still more “solutions.” That way lies a never-ending quest, costing ever increasing amounts of taxpayers money and — more important — ever greater losses of your freedom to live your own life as you see fit, rather than as presumptuous elites dictate.
Ultimately, our choice is to give up Utopian quests or give up our freedom. This has been recognized for centuries by some, but many others have not yet faced that reality, even today. If you think government should “do something” about anything that ticks you off, or anything you want and don’t have, then you have made your choice between Utopia and freedom.
Back in the 18th century, Edmund Burke said, “It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, to know much of an evil ought to be tolerated” and “I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes.”
But today’s crusading zealots are not about to tolerate evils or infirmities. If insurance companies are not behaving the way some people think they should, then their answer is to set up a government bureaucracy to either control insurance companies or replace them…
Read the entire article at National Review Online
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
