Bovardisms

by Jim Bovard

Politicians are increasingly dividing Americans into two classes — those who work for a living and those who vote for a living. But politicians cannot undermine self-reliance without subverting self-government.

Americans are more likely to encounter liberty in history books instead of their own lives. Many young people are unaware of bygone eras when citizens traveled without being groped or protested without being quarantined in an Orwellian “free-speech zone.”

Politicians ban guns so that no one can resist their decrees or their injections.

The most dangerous inequality is that between the rulers and the ruled. No private citizen has a prerogative to forcibly accost, wrongly shoot, and wantonly plunder their neighbors.

Censorship rests on the presumed moral and intellectual superiority of the ruling class.  That illusion can be maintained only by suppressing all news of government fiascos and frauds.

Politicians vilified individual freedom as the greatest threat to Americans’ survival.

Is America becoming a Cage Keeper Democracy where voters merely ratify the latest demolition of their rights and liberties?

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/will-any-last-rights-epigram-go-to-the-moon

Epigrams are excellent propellants for seditious ideas. How far can one line go?

Thirty years ago, I casually appended a sentence to the end of a paragraph in the final chapter of my book, Lost Rights: The Death of American Liberty. I was amazed: “Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner” became one of the most popular worldwide epigrams on democracy. It was translated into almost fifty languages, quoted by the Chief Justice of Hong Kong, and is serving as a rallying cry for oppressed dissidents everywhere. That epigram circulated on coffee cups, t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, a video by the Cartoonist Laureate of the Netherlands, and appeared in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and the Oxford Essential Quotations. When The New York Times published a series of articles on the worldwide crisis of democracy in September 2018, that quote provided the theme: “Are the Wolves Devouring Democracy?”

No wonder I like epigrams nowadays. My latest book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, is stock full of zippety lines that will hopefully edify, amuse, and perhaps enrage readers. Will any of those lines catch fire and propagate?

Here are some snappy sentences from that book:

Americans today have the “freedom” to be fleeced, groped, wiretapped, censored, injected, disarmed, beaten, vilified, detained, & maybe shot by government agents.

We have an Impunity Democracy in which government officials pay no price for their crimes.

Americans today are more likely to believe in witches, ghosts, and astrology than to trust the federal government.

Politicians are increasingly dividing Americans into two classes — those who work for a living and those who vote for a living. But politicians cannot undermine self-reliance without subverting self-government.

Arbitrary power converts bureaucrats into czars who bedevil who they please. If government is not “under the law,” citizens will be under the federal boot.

The federal government is generating so many absurdities nowadays that even cynics cannot keep up.

Americans are more likely to encounter liberty in history books instead of their own lives. Many young people are unaware of bygone eras when citizens traveled without being groped or protested without being quarantined in an Orwellian “free-speech zone.”

Politicians are hell-bent on protecting citizens against everything except government.

Guns

See the rest here

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