06-11-2019, 03:50 AM
(06-10-2019, 07:26 AM)Tech2 Wrote: Welcome to the land of the free.
Driving a car ranges from a luxury to a convenience to a necessity. The motor vehicle is a later innovation than democracy. The private automobile is a dying institution in such places as New York City, Tokyo, Paris, London, Seoul, and maybe San Francisco.
Economic convenience is not democracy. Democracy cannot give people everything that they want. Some people get priced out of living certain places and into miserable places. Nobody wants to live in a slum, but that is what is available to many of us. To adapt a phrase of Benjamin Franklin, people who would trade their essential freedom for economic gain will lose their freedom and get no gain.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.