Comments (3)

• C. Evans

  This is a must read. I downloaded it from Mises and I plan to purchase a hard copy just because I must have one on hand in case I need to quickly reference la Boetie's wisdom. This is my favorite quote. He's talking about a king, but given we elect a dictator for four years, it's quite apropos:
  "Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows---to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces..."

  Published: September 30, 2008 2:47 PM

• Book 'em Danno

  C. Evans, I wanted to match your fine quotation with the Bible's Samuel 8 but settled on a snippet from Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. As the orcs gather for another try at 'bail out' and continued war in Mordor D.C. the following reminds me of my inherent dignity:

  "...Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys,(5) and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts — a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments..."

  Published: September 30, 2008 4:00 PM

• Barack Hussein Obeyme

  And yet....
  AFTER the election.. a despotic government is granted free reign, a will of it's own, the restraints of the Constitution thown off entirely, a fascist relationship with businesses that were tainted by touching "public" funds of fictitious money FORCED on them, demonized "greedy" self serving profiteers are replaced by Obama's little angels and while his mindless thralls of Mouseketeers swoon over him and his racketeers, wheres the peep from our freedom loving peacenicks?

  CHAMPIONS!!... dud duh duh drrrrrr! of the individual free-will, which makes a MAN a living thing at all, and retrofitted to the laws of man in the form of L-I-B-E-R-T-Y!
  Harken! says the pretentious poet muse in mine palpitating heart! Hear I deafenning silence?

  Give me ----one----friggin-----break----.

  I'm sorry.. you asked for a "civil" comment. Did I disobey? Scuse em wahhhhh whilst I light my fag on Romes.. sorry, America's artsey-fartsilly burning walls.

  "such a man as an American government can make"
  through our socialist school system? HA! wouldn't withdraw his consent from a depspotic government (as is his duty inherited from the 1st forefathers written in the Declaration of Independence) if they started crucifying Christians on the White House lawn.

  Published: August 8, 2009 9:05 PM