… is from page 284 of the eminent Harvard historian Richard Pipes’s wonderful 1999 volume, Property and Freedom (footnote excluded):
The trend of modern times appears to indicate that citizens of democracies are willing heedlessly to surrender their freedoms to purchase social equality (along with economic security), apparently oblivious of the consequences. And the consequences are that their ability to hold on to and use what they earn and own, to hire and fire at will, to enter freely into contracts, and even to speak their mind is steadily being eroded by governments bent on redistributing private assets and subordinating individual rights to group rights. The entire concept of the welfare state as it has evolved in the second half of the twentieth century is incompatible with individual liberty, for it allows various groups with common needs to combine and claim the right to satisfy them at the expense of society at large, in the process steadily enhancing the power of the state which acts on their behalf.
Yes. And, again, this obliviousness to the freedom-crushing features of the obsession with economic inequality and ‘redistribution’ has as part of its foundation the strange “Progressive” notion that the desire to keep what one owns and has earned is illiberal, ungenerous, anachronistic, and greedy, while the desire to take what others own and have earned is liberal, generous, enlightened, and selfless. As I say, it’s a strange notion, but one that – because it is repeated so often in so many ways and in so many different venues – strikes most people today as being not only normal but right.
