Quote of the Day - Freedom and Equality

I am not sure I am either.

Most of the people who say they are for Equality are in reality for no such thing. Link.

A brief turn once again to American Individualism (Herbert Hoover):

And from it all I emerge an individualist – an unashamed individualist. But let me say also that I am an American individualist. – Page 6

No doubt, individualism run riot, with no tempering principle, would provide a long category of inequalities, of tyrannies, dominations, and injustices. America, however, has tempered the whole conception of individualism by the injection of a definite principle, and from this principle it follows that attempts at domination, whether in government or in the processes of industry and commerce, are under an insistent curb. If we would have the values of individualism, their stimulation to initiative, to the development of land and intellect, to the high development of thought and spirituality, they must be tempered with that firm and fixed ideal of American individualism – an equality of opportunity. If we would have these values we must soften its hardness and stimulate progress through that sense of service that lies in our people.

Therefore, it is not the individualism of other countries for which I would speak, but the individualism of America. Our individualism differs from all others because it embraces these great ideals: that while we build our society upon the attainment of the individual, we shall safeguard to every individual an equality of opportunity to take that position in the community to which his intelligence, character, ability, and ambition entitle him; that we keep the social solution free from frozen strata of classes, that we shall stimulate effort of each individual to achievement; that through an enlarging sense of responsibility and understanding we shall assist him to this attainment; while he in turn must stand up to the emery wheel of competition. – Pages 6-8

We in America have had too much experience of life to fool ourselves into pretending that all men are equal in ability, in character, in intelligence, and ambition, That was part of the clap-trap of the French Revolution. We have grown to understand that all we can hope to assure to the individual through government is liberty, justice, intellectual welfare, equality of opportunity, and stimulation to service.

It is in maintenance of a society fluid to these human qualities that our individualism departs from the individualism of Europe. There can be no rise for the individual through the frozen strata of classes, or of castes, and no stratification can take place in a mass livened by the free stir of its particles. The guarding of our individualism against stratification insists not only in preserving in the social solution an equal opportunity for the able and ambitious to rise from the bottom; it also insists that the sons of the successful shall not by any mere right of birth or favor continue to occupy their fathers’ places of power against the rise of a new generation in process of coming up from the bottom. … Otherwise our American fields of opportunity would have been clogged with long generations inheriting their fathers’ privileges without their fathers’ capacity for service. – Pages 15-16

I'll stop there (I can cut and paste those all morning)...but the answer is clearly American Freedom (or Liberty). It ensures both.

David Foster (View Comment):

Most of the people who say they are for Equality are in reality for no such thing. Link.

That was that small fraction of gatekeepers who decide issues of equity comment is about. The nomenklatura in the USSR and the Woke Folk here today.

philo (View Comment):

A brief turn once again to American Individualism (Herbert Hoover):

And from it all I emerge an individualist – an unashamed individualist. But let me say also that I am an American individualist. – Page 6

No doubt, individualism run riot, with no tempering principle, would provide a long category of inequalities, of tyrannies, dominations, and injustices. America, however, has tempered the whole conception of individualism by the injection of a definite principle, and from this principle it follows that attempts at domination, whether in government or in the processes of industry and commerce, are under an insistent curb. If we would have the values of individualism, their stimulation to initiative, to the development of land and intellect, to the high development of thought and spirituality, they must be tempered with that firm and fixed ideal of American individualism – an equality of opportunity. If we would have these values we must soften its hardness and stimulate progress through that sense of service that lies in our people.

Therefore, it is not the individualism of other countries for which I would speak, but the individualism of America. Our individualism differs from all others because it embraces these great ideals: that while we build our society upon the attainment of the individual, we shall safeguard to every individual an equality of opportunity to take that position in the community to which his intelligence, character, ability, and ambition entitle him; that we keep the social solution free from frozen strata of classes, that we shall stimulate effort of each individual to achievement; that through an enlarging sense of responsibility and understanding we shall assist him to this attainment; while he in turn must stand up to the emery wheel of competition. – Pages 6-8

We in America have had too much experience of life to fool ourselves into pretending that all men are equal in ability, in character, in intelligence, and ambition, That was part of the clap-trap of the French Revolution. We have grown to understand that all we can hope to assure to the individual through government is liberty, justice, intellectual welfare, equality of opportunity, and stimulation to service.

It is in maintenance of a society fluid to these human qualities that our individualism departs from the individualism of Europe. There can be no rise for the individual through the frozen strata of classes, or of castes, and no stratification can take place in a mass livened by the free stir of its particles. The guarding of our individualism against stratification insists not only in preserving in the social solution an equal opportunity for the able and ambitious to rise from the bottom; it also insists that the sons of the successful shall not by any mere right of birth or favor continue to occupy their fathers’ places of power against the rise of a new generation in process of coming up from the bottom. … Otherwise our American fields of opportunity would have been clogged with long generations inheriting their fathers’ privileges without their fathers’ capacity for service. – Pages 15-16

I’ll stop there (I can cut and paste those all morning)…but the answer is clearly American Freedom (or Liberty). It ensures both.

Hoover preferred equality to freedom, according to what I speculate are Seawriter’s particular definitions of those two dangerously ambiguous terms, which he does not specify.

There is a common misconception that the New Deal, whose true purpose was to increase “equality” at the expense of “freedom”, was started by FDR.

History reveals the fact it was started by the Hoover administration. One of incoming staffers (historians, please help me with the name and the exact quote) of the new Roosevelt administration confessed to being amazed to discover, upon studying the documents of the outgoing regime, that the majority of the FDR agenda had already been implemented by Hoover.

Coolidge and Harding, not Hoover and not Reagan, were the last non-RINO republican Republican Presidents of the US.