[Guest post by DRJ]
Vicki McClure Davidson at the Frugal Cafe Blog Zone has a fascinating retrospective of Thanksgiving art culminating with Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving Day masterpiece “Freedom from Want.” And here is a link to a slideshow of Rockwell’s famous “Four Freedoms.”
— DRJ
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DRJ:
“Freedom from want” may be a laudable goal, but it’s not a “freedom,” in the sense of “freedom of speech” or “freedom of assembly.”
This is Argument by Tendentious Ambiguity: The word “freedom” in “freedom from want” simply means absence… the absence of poverty and hunger.
The same word has a very different meaning in “freedom of speech;” there it means the liberty to express one’s own ideas. They are two completely different defintions of the same word.
Freedom of speech is an essential element of liberty.
Freedom from want, in the Norman Rockwell sense, is just another tired form of socialism; it’s the malicious meme that the government is ultimately responsible for providing all necessities of life to every citizen.
Rockwell, like Frank Capra, fit well in the era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America’s second liberal-fascist president.
It irritates me no end when supposed conservatives (Michael Medved springs to mind) mindlessly intone that FDR was one of our greatest presidents… when in fact he was a complete disaster, as far as liberty, Capitalism, self-reliance, the spread of Communism, and American exceptionalism are concerned.
Dafydd
Dafydd the Pedantic (96b517) — 11/27/2009 @ 1:50 amDRJ:
P.S.: The most recent manifestation of the fallacy of a “right” to be free of want is ably and chillingly recounted in Peter Schweizer’s seminal Architects of Ruin.
The “want” in this case was home-ownership; when the government (pushed by liberal activists) decided that everyone had a right to own his own home, they forced the banks to loan too much money to people with too little income and too high a credit risk.
The result was the housing collapse — which led to the presidency of Barack H. Obama and calls (you guessed it) to make it even easier for people who can’t afford houses to “buy” them nevertheless.
And all for the want of the distinction between the two definitions of “freedom!”
Dafydd
Dafydd the Pedantic (96b517) — 11/27/2009 @ 1:58 amHistory is replete with examples of people losing their freedom when they lost their food source.
nk (df76d4) — 11/27/2009 @ 5:02 amDafydd,
Good point but I still like Norman Rockwell.
DRJ (dee47d) — 11/27/2009 @ 2:35 pmDRJ:
As a painter, he’s great!
As a political philosopher…
Dafydd
Dafydd the Agreeable (96b517) — 11/28/2009 @ 2:44 am