“Freedom from fear” and “freedom from want”, two of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, are insidious positive rights. They are provably incompatible with liberty.

Give the government the enough power to assuage James’s fear and I will fear that government.

Give the government the economic power to sate the wants of the laziest among us, and I guarantee that someone else’s wants will not be met. The economy will never reach the desired equilibrium and the thermodynamic losses of the effort will impoverish all.

Sean Flynn
April 13, 2009
In the comments to this post.
[There is something about the vocabulary and the way Sean puts words together that makes it nearly instantly recognizable to me. Any one of those paragraphs would have been enough for me to guess that it was Sean writing them. So succinct and yet not leaving out anything important. What is just as interesting to me is that he talks just like that too.–Joe]