Quotation of the Day…

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…. is from pages 265-266 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and still-important 1937 book, The Good Society:

For it is not necessary to choose between social control administered by the aggrandized state and a self-assertive individualism subject to no social control. That supposedly exclusive choice, which causes such furious party antagonism in our society, overlooks entirely one of the oldest, best established, and most successful methods of social control in human experience. It is social control, not by authority fro9m above commanding this man to to this and that man to do that, but social control by a common law which defines the reciprocal rights and duties of persons and invites them to enforce the law by proving their case in a court of law.

This method of social control is, I submit, the appropriate method for a self-governing people to use.