Good News: Ed Rasimus[1]and Gary Graham[2] are more than just decorative, they've got a considerable clue.
Bad News: Ed's got a posting with links addressing the Executive's attempted strong-arming of Chrysler creditors. When it comes to government bullying, Ayn Rand was a starry-eyed optimist, as innocent as Dorothy Gale.
...And people wonder why I list my politics as "anarchist." Theodore Roosevelt's "bully pulpit" leads all too directly to bullying in the more commonly-used sense of the word. Hand a man -- any man -- a cudgel the size of the Presidency and he's going to use it. Ditto Congresscritters and so on all the way down to dogcatchers and metermaids. The only way to even begin to contain it is to push back just as hard as you can. And at that, I believe it may only be a delaying action.
Machiavelli (and H. Beam Piper) probably had it right: individual freedom is a temporary state between one form of coercive rule and another. That's no reason to not try making it last as long as possible.
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1. Of course, there is a rather large body of preexisting evidence that Ed's not just another handsome guy in an airplane. Ahem.
2. I always found him appealing in Alien Nation reruns and thanks to Chris Muir, I've learned he's not the usual Hollywood whiner, either. Color me fangirl.
I suspect the only reason that Piper isn't the patron saint of the pro-gunners these days is that few know who he was anymore, or have read any of his books.
ReplyDeleteThere was a brief Piper revival in the '80s but since then John Carr is about the only one still carrying the torch (and he's writing strictly in the Kalvan/Paratime universe).
It's too bad, because IMHO Piper actually has a lot more to teach us about the "self-reliant man" and the true meaning of freedom than even Heinlein does.
Think about a movie of "Junk-yard Planet" with everyone walking around with a gun and belt as normal business attire! If course, Merlin would be a bit smaller.
ReplyDeletePiper was one of my all-time favorite authors;I started reading his stuff just a couple of years before he died.
ReplyDeleteI've met Gary, at my firearms school. Nice guy. And he outshot me on the test, the SOB.
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