Supreme Court Balkanizes The Nation

I usually leave the political and topical stuff to Eric. He enjoys it, I don't, and the resulting complementarity seems to work well for both of us.

That being said, sometimes a political event takes place that cries out for attention, an event so shockingly conspicuous that even a confirmed politics-ducker like myself can't help noticing.

I refer of course to the supreme court (they no longer deserve capitalization), and their recent Kelo ruling.

To put it tactfully, it's a freaking outrage. Speaking more forthrightly, it rips the body politic a new one and then defecates in the wound. I have yet to speak with a fellow citizen, any fellow citizen, who approves of this judicial travesty.

"WTF were they thinking?" doesn't quite do my feelings justice.

"Rose Wilder Lane Week" continues here at Classical Values, and I thought that perhaps I could tie it in with my own personal dismay at the ongoing evolution (lethal mutation?) of our oh-so-modern takings doctrine.

Luckily, Mrs. Lane has provided me with a colorful and trenchant anecdote. She had good instincts. I wish I could read her reaction to this latest betrayal of the little guy. I'm sure it would be forceful and direct.

Here then is another excerpt from "The Discovery of Freedom"...

Twenty years ago the Dukhagini in the Dinaric Alps were living in the same obedience to their Law of Lek. I tried for hours to convince some of them that a man can own a house.

A dangerously radical woman of the village was demanding a house. She had helped her husband build it; now she was a childless widow, but she wanted to keep that house. It was an ordinary house; a small, stone-roofed hovel, without floor, window, or chimney.

Obstinately anti-social, she doggedly repeated, “With these hands, my hands, I built up the walls. I laid the roof-stones with my hands. It is my house. I want my house.”

The villagers said, “It is a madness. A spirit of the rocks, not human, has entered into her.”

They were intelligent. My plea for the woman astounded them, but upon reflection they produced most of the sound arguments for communism: economic equality, economic security, social order.

I said that in America a man owns a house. They could not believe it; they admired America. They had heard of its marvels; during the recent world war they had seen with their eyes the airplanes from that fabulous land.

They questioned me shrewdly. I staggered myself by mentioning taxes; I had to admit that an American pays the tribe for possession of a house. This seemed to concede that the American tribe does own the house. I was routed; their high opinion of my country was restored.

Well, there you have it. A sad story, but an instructive one. The highest court in the land has affirmed our right to live like impoverished Balkan peasants. Impoverished peasants of the 1920's, no less.

What a piece of work. I yield the floor to Mrs. Lane, with a little added emphasis...

Free thought, free speech, free action, and freehold property are the source of the modern world. It cannot exist without them.


posted by Justin on 07.07.05 at 07:10 AM





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A reading:

"What is the specifically American sense of life?

A sense of life is so complex an integration that the best way to identify it is by means of concrete examples and by contrast with the manifestations of a different sense of life.

The emotional keynote of most Europeans is the feeling that man belongs to the State, as a property to be used and disposed of, in compliance with his natural, metaphysically determined fate. A typical European may disapprove of a given State and may rebel, seeking to establish what he regards as a better one, like a slave who might seek a better master to serve - but the idea that he is the sovereign and the government is his servant, has no emotional reality in his consciousness. He regards service to the State as an ultimate moral sanction, as an honor, and if you told him that his life is an end in itself, he would feel insulted or rejected or lost. Generations brought up on statist philosophy and acting accordingly, have implanted this in his mind from the earliest, formative years of his childhood.

A typical American can never grasp that kind of feeling. An American is an independent entity. The popular expression of protest against 'being pushed around' is emotionally unintelligible to Europeans, who believe that to be pushed around is their natural condition. Emotionally, an American has no concept of service (or of servitude) to anyone. Even if he enlists in the army and hears it called 'service to country,' his feeling is that of a generous aristocrat who chose to do a dangerous task. A European soldier feels that he is doing his duty.

A European, on any social level, lives in a world made by others (he never knows clearly by whom), and seeks or accepts his place in it. The American attitude is best expressed by a line from a poem: 'The world began when I was born and the world is mine to win.' ('The Westerner' by Badger Clark.)

A European is disarmed in the face of a dictatorship: he may hate it, but he feels that he is wrong and, metaphysically, the State is right. An American rebels to the bottom of his soul."

(Ayn Rand -- "Dont Let It Go", 1971)

Billy Beck   ·  July 7, 2005 05:25 PM

Reminds me of Clarence E. Manion's dualism between "European" collectivism vs. "American" individualism. But, then, what would Rand or Manion say differentiates Europe from Asia? Is not Asia far more collectivist than Europe? America is part of Europe, the most vital part now, the freest, mightiest, greatest of the nations of Europe, the most European, the most Western, the most Faustian, the most individualist, of the nations of Europe. Yes, tragically, the rest of Europe has sunk into the bog of collectivism, of "Asianism", and only America remains standing. But we must never forget our European roots. To the contrary, it is all the more imperative that we preserve all that is left of the great European high culture. That is our destiny. America is Rome, the rest of Europe is Greece.



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