Vrooooom and Zoom - There Goes Summer
It’s been over a month since I last wrote anything here, and by golly if we aren’t practically staring autumn in the face already. By the time I publish my observations on days six and seven of our April trip to Mexico, we’ll probably be ankle-deep in our first snow fall of the season – an event we had hoped to miss out on this year before we stepped into the surreal world of selling our house.
It’s all starting to seem like an endless loop of one thing leading to another, this business of upping the curb appeal, bringing the interior up-to-date, listing the property with a realtor, and finding a warmer location we feel comfortable retiring to before 2014 comes to an end – all while simultaneously sorting and clearing fifty-plus years of habitation out of every nook and cranny of my husband’s family homestead.
But one of the rewards of pawing through other people’s decades’ worth of collected memorabilia (and my in-laws were world champion savers, for sure) is that you stumble upon at least one treasure in every string of “what in the world is this?” discoveries.
Below, the transcription of a P.R. piece published circa 1963, in blue ink, on an ivory-colored 6″ by 3-1/2″ card by Coast Federal Savings and Loan Association’s Free Enterprise Department, located at 9th and Hill, Los Angeles 14, California.
Try picturing a contemporary politician being willing to risk offending the low-information contingent of the electorate with such high expectations. And can you even imagine a bank today having the backbone to share such a message, with ranks of waiting-to-be-insulted professional victims lurking around every corner, visions of a lucrative lawsuit dancing in their heads?
Sadly, neither can I. But here, from a slightly more common sense era, the quoted comments of Representative Richard H. Poff, as originally published in the November 3, 1962, issue of the magazine Human Events.
WHAT IS FREE ENTERPRISE
“Basically, the free enterprise system means freedom of the individual. Under the free enterprise system, the individual is free to make something of himself if he has the enterprise to do it. Too many people put too much emphasis on ‘free’ and too little emphasis on ‘enterprise.’
“The difference between a free nation and a slave nation can be very simply stated. In a free nation, the people accept the responsibility for their own welfare; while in a slave nation that responsibility is turned over to the government. Or, to put it another way, meaning the same thing, in a free nation the state gets its right from the people; while in a slave nation, the people get their rights, if any, from the state.”
But wait, as infomercials are fond of insisting; there’s more. Flip the card over and you find these words of wisdom, reprinted from the January 1961 issue of Manage Magazine, and titled
TIME IS RUNNING OUT
“The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations progressed through this sequence:
From Bondage to Spiritual Faith
From Spiritual Faith to Great Courage
From Courage to Liberty
From Liberty to Abundance
From Abundance to Selfishness
From Selfishness to Complacency
From Complacency to Apathy
From Apathy to Dependency
From Dependency back again into Bondage
“In sixteen years our nation will be 200 years old. This cycle is not inevitable…
IT DEPENDS UPON YOU”
Is it just me being paranoid, or have we indeed become far too comfortable with the idea that our rights derive from the government, and far too accepting of the creeping ideology that we answer to government rather than the other way ’round? Is this the selfish complacency of which we were warned, the apathy and dependency predicted about the same time this sturdy old house of mine was being built?
This Labor Day holiday, I hope to stand with the Founders and reclaim the truth that man’s rights come from God, not from an elitist political class which wields the power of the State like a sledge hammer. May the free and the enterprising lead the way out of this bondage and back again into the spiritual faith from which our true liberty derives.