“Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Lecture, 2010
“It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist.”
Lord Acton, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” 1877.
Sometimes you write something, and think of the next thing to say . . . but realize you cannot say it in the space allotted. Or that the next thought should be “saved for next time.” Or maybe you merely wonder “Will the reader think of that too?”
In expanding on Friday’s water discussion, for Townhall this weekend, I wondered, “Will the reader think of Fourier?”
Fourier famously said that, with socialism, the oceans would be filled with lemonade!
Which would lead to a scarcity of water. A constituent of lemonade, but more important and versatile than the famous tart sugary fruit drink.
Actually, socialism leads to far worse scarcities than a dystopia of lemon-spiked seas.
As we now know. Read the column at Townhall. Come back here and click the links to Friday’s water Common Sense. And look up online the work of PERC, and of economists like these:
“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.”
William Shakespearen, Julius Caesar (1599), Caesar, Act II, scene ii.
A simple and powerful statement from John Stossel.
“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.”
Lord Acton, Letter to Mary Gladstone (April 24, 1881).
“The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.”
Lord Acton, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” 1877.
“Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Lecture, 2010
“You can’t make facts fit the rules, it is the other way round. The rules have to be adopted to fit the facts.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Time of the Hero, 1963
On March 24, 1765, the Kingdom of Great Britain passed the Quartering Act, which required the Thirteen Colonies to house British troops.
On the same date in 1855, slavery was abolished in Venezuela.
The Intolerable Acts (among which was the Quartering Act) was the American Patriots’ name for a series of punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea party. They were meant to punish the Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in throwing a large tea shipment into Boston harbor. In Great Britain, these laws were referred to as the Coercive Acts.