Bonus Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on June 6, 2019
… is from pages 269-270 of Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1965 volume, The Americans: The National Experience:
But in the vast stretches of North America the American anachronism was being again and again re-enacted: Community before Government. In the North American West, communities had sprung up, often far from one another, often “beyond the jurisdiction” of the United States but not unambiguously within the jurisdiction of any other government. Clusters of people bound by common hopes, common worries, and common illusions, they were communities. Their lack of established patterns of government added to their problems, but their freedom from obsolete local patterns of government also had advantages. They were perhaps more free than such large numbers of men at their stage of civilization had ever been before – free from the need either to live within, or to rebel against, a rigid pattern imported from far away and long ago.
Comments
