Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Standard cuisine ...

... A fitting meal of beef, grouse and whine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The best chapter in the book (or perhaps I should say the one with which I most heartily agree) is that about a prevalent modern form of wrongful, or perverted, complaint, namely litigation. In a society with few agreed moral boundaries, people increasingly look to the law to draw those boundaries. For them, anything that is legal is permissible; only the illegal is impermissible. 'There's no law against it' or 'There's a law against it' become incontrovertible moral arguments. This, however, means that we have abdicated our freedom and given legislators total moral authority over us. Nothing stands between the isolated individual and his egotistical whims on the one hand and the government and its diktats on the other. The result is a strange and unappealing mixture of inflamed individualism and collectivist conformism.

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