The Road To Serfdom

Remember when Nancy Pelosi told people they could quit their day jobs and be creative because we productive members of society would take care of their health care for them?

This sort of newspeak nonsense isn't new. Socialists have been pushing their version of "freedom" for decades. In fact, in The Road To Serfdom, published in 1940, author F.A. Hayek discussed the perversion of the word "freedom" into another term for redistribution of wealth. I've linked to the Reader's Digest condensed version of this work. It is excellent reading and very, very relevant. Socialism takes us down a dangerous path, and Hayek does a wonderful job explaining why. PLEASE read and share this! Here's a sample:

To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives – the craving for freedom – socialists began increasingly to make use of the promise of a ‘new freedom’.Socialism was to bring ‘economic freedom’ without which political freedom was ‘not worth having’.

To make this argument sound plausible, the word ‘freedom’was subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity,release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.

 Freedom from coercion is true liberty. Freedom from necessity (to pay for health care for example) is the exact opposite of liberty, since it depends on coercion to work.