Few took Perry's comments about Texas secession seriously but they created a political stir and highlighted the conservative backlash to Obama's policies. Perry also has rejected about $550 million in potential funds for his state from the federal stimulus package for jobless claims.
But in a sign that this is out of step with the broader public mood, the Republican-controlled Texas legislature is moving toward changing the state's unemployment benefits rules so the funds can be accepted.
Liberty does seem to be at odds with "the broader public mood" and that is what this blog is attempting to document. Unless (or until) the public values liberty we shall continue our decline.
Government dependency is the same as any other deleterious addiction: You have to hit bottom before you will seek treatment. While under the influence, a person is at a more vulnerable state. It should not be assumed that everyone will seek treatment, or if they do, will overcome it. Regardless, it is just as likely they will die or suffer permanent injuries.
So too with civilizations. It should not be assumed that we will reform ourselves, at least not in our collective lifetimes. It is just as possible that the feeding frenzy from the public troth will increase, especially as the economy weakens further.
While we are in that depressed state, we are vulnerable.
From A Short History of the World, H.G. Wells (1866–1946), Chapter XXXIX. The Barbarians Break the Empire into East and West:
The opening half of the fifth century saw the whole of the Roman Empire in Europe the prey of robber armies of barbarians. It is difficult to visualize the state of affairs in the world at that time. Over France, Spain, Italy and the Balkan peninsula, the great cities that had flourished under the early empire still stood, impoverished, partly depopulated and falling into decay. Life in them must have been shallow, mean and full of uncertainty. Local officials asserted their authority and went on with their work with such conscience as they had, no doubt in the name of a now remote and inaccessible emperor. The churches went on, but usually with illiterate priests. There was little reading and much superstition and fear. But everywhere except where looters had destroyed them, books and pictures and statuary and such-like works of art were still to be found.
The life of the countryside had also degenerated. Everywhere this Roman world was much more weedy and untidy than it had been. In some regions war and pestilence had brought the land down to the level of a waste. Roads and forests were infested with robbers. Into such regions the barbarians marched, with little or no opposition, and set up their chiefs as rulers, often with Roman official titles. If they were half civilized barbarians they would give the conquered districts tolerable terms, they would take possession of the towns, associate and intermarry, and acquire (with an accent) the Latin speech; but the Jutes, the Angles and Saxons who submerged the Roman province of Britain were agriculturalists and had no use for towns, they seem to have swept south Britain clear of the Romanized population and they replaced the language by their own Teutonic dialects, which became at last English.
It is impossible in the space at our disposal to trace the movements of all the various German and Slavonic tribes as they went to and fro in the disorganized empire in search of plunder and a pleasant home. But let the Vandals serve as an example. They came into history in east Germany. They settled as we have told in Pannonia. Thence they moved somewhen about 425 A.D. through the intervening provinces to Spain. There they found Visigoths from South Russia and other German tribes setting up dukes and kings. From Spain the Vandals under Genseric sailed for North Africa (429), captured Carthage (439), and built a fleet. They secured the mastery of the sea and captured and pillaged Rome (455), which had recovered very imperfectly from her capture and looting by Alaric half a century earlier. Then the Vandals made themselves masters of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and most of the other islands of the western Mediterranean. They made, in fact, a sea empire very similar in its extent to the sea empire of Carthage seven hundred odd years before. They were at the climax of their power about 477. They were a mere handful of conquerors holding all this country. In the next century almost all their territory had been reconquered for the empire of Constantinople during a transitory blaze of energy under Justinian I.
The story of the Vandals is but one sample of a host of similar adventures. But now there was coming into the European world the least kindred and most redoubtable of all these devastators, the Mongolian Huns or Tartars, a yellow people active and able, such as the western world had never before encountered.
It was a thousand years before the dark ages ended.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.- Aldous Huxley
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