(emphasis added) "We Americans, like everyone else, are constantly at risk of events that can ruin our finances, destroy our health, crush our bodies, and break our hearts. Among these chronic risks, the probability that terrorists will harm us is vanishingly small, so small that rational people would disregard it completely because any time spent worrying about it or attempting to reduce it would be at the expense of time and effort that could have been spent in more productive ways. Yet this tiny risk provides the rationale for the state to spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually at our expense, to ride roughshod over millions of people in southwest Asia and elsewhere, and to smash our liberties one after another. That the American people tolerate this gigantic ripoff -- because the transfer of income and wealth that it involves is its only rational, if completely antisocial, basis -- testifies to the power of fear and ideology. Americans are so terrorized by their own irrational fear and their own irrational hatred of "the other" that they are content to be reduced to QUIVERING, TAXPAYING PROTOPLASM. Their ancestors, who bore vastly greater risks with fortitude, would have been horrified had they known what would become of their progeny." -Robert Higgs
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 14:59:39 +0000
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