“…civilization as we know it would be in jeopardy if the Republican Party recaptures control of the US Senate later this year,” a recent quote of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Here, once again, Nancy Pelosi is seeking to manage our common resource of liberty by terrorizing the populace with her Malthusian alarmist version of the tragedy of the commons.

Now compare Pelosi’s statement with Frederic Bastiat’s words below. Bastiat, a French classical liberal theorist and political economist, “asserted that the sole purpose of government is to protect the right of an individual to life, liberty, and property, and why it is dangerous and morally wrong for government to interfere with an individual’s other personal matters.” Source: Wikipedia.

“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”

Frederic Bastiat 

Let’s talk about that plunder.

In a previous post I quoted an old preacher who said “That if it is new it is not true. If it is true it is not new.” So, for our purposes today we must take a trip in the Wayback Machine and go back twenty years when you will hear Walter E. Williams say “The growth of the leviathan state is undermining our moral priorities.”  (emphasis mine)

 Here is economist Walter E. Williams, back in 1994 (!!), talking about America’s moral decline, the government being used to steal from one another, the making of America into a nation of thieves, socialized medicine, criminalizing just about everything we do, taxation, lumping the trivial in with the barbaric and doing battle with the Hun –big government.

Next, Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, in a highly entertaining 1993 speech given at a CATO Institute dinner, claims, as Walter Williams infers, that Bill Clinton, that “agent of change” is actually a Bush-o-nomics successor writ large.

 Friedman goes on to say that the current economic policy is “Starving the market that has been working and feeding the (gov’t.) market that has been failing.” And, sadly, too, that we as a nation are now more wealthy but less free, less secure.

He reminds us that Ronald Reagan sought low taxes, less regulations, a restraint on government spending and a stable monetary policy. And, aphorisms are deployed – here:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies.”

Frederic Bastiat

 “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

Frederic Bastiat

Anticipate the optics when you vote this fall and later in 2016. More importantly, look behind the Kabuki theater curtain of political optics at the moral character of those who are supposedly representing us. At the very least, look at the character of those who will read a bill before signing it.

 Remember, too, as you go to vote, that if you are one of the mega-millions in the lottery of unemployed or underemployed “that you don’t have to be job-locked.” – Nancy Pelosi, Progressive aphorist, reminding us that we each of us can feed off the government because Obamacare is our salvation:

“If you like your healthcare you can keep your healthcare. If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.” Aphorist-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama

Another Progressive aphorism: “Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself.” Franklin D. Roosevelt. More bullish nonsense catapulted into Aphorism Infamy.

We had better fear Big Brother because he is more Cain than Abel.