Quote of the Day, Part II
A late entrant, but it speaks volumes of those who seek to rule:
Congressional Black Caucus chair Marcia Fudge had harsh words on Thursday night for GOP colleagues on the House Agriculture Committee who she says “literally do not believe there is poverty in this country.”
In a George Washington University panel discussion on poverty hosted by PBS’s Tavis Smiley, Fudge expressed her disappointment with colleagues who voted to cut food stamps by $16.5 billion over the next 10 years.
“These same people believe if you do not work, you are lazy,” Fudge told the symposium, which was aired on C-SPAN. “These same people believe that if your children don’t get a good education, something is wrong with you. These are the craziest people I have seen in my life. Just absolute nuts. They don’t understand that the government’s job is to take care of its people.”
“The government’s job is to take care of its people.” It’s people.
When Ronald Reagan gave his first inaugural address on this day in 1981, he said, “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.”
In perhaps the ultimate Kinsley-esque gaffe, Fudge has flipped that entire notion on its head.
“The government’s job is to take care of its people.”
Just as it was the job of plantation owners to take care their chattel.
One of the most strenuous arguments the antebellum pro-slavers made was that slavery was morally neccessary because the act of providing for themselves — food, clothing, shelter — was simply beyond the ken of the chattel that the slavers so paternally cared for.
All, of course, couched in moral platitudes near-identical save for fashions of grammar and time to those used by Marcia Fudge and her ilk.
…the difference of course being Fudge sees herself as part of the benevolent slave owning class. Only the ones who don’t follow big government’s wonderful decrees get the whip.
I’ll bet if she had a chance to sign up as property of the government, she’d go for it without a glimmer of irony.
She’s already trying to sign the REST of us up….
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/01/smackdown-john-f-kennedy-vs-milton-friedman-2/
Milton Friedman:
“The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?”