Explaining Myself

As I have never been one to shy away from expressing my opinion on any range of issues, the time afforded to me by the end of the school year and the importance of the era in which I live has left me compelled to give into the urge to start one of these things. I doubt anybody will be reading this, but readership is not my aim. I merely wish to have a means of wringing out the confusion, anger, and disbelief that I absorb from the world around me.

The title of this blog comes from the opening chapter of Freidrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, a work which recognized the threat posed to liberty and prosperity by the rising tide of socialist tendencies among the governments of Great Britain and the United States in the post WWII-era. Hayek makes the case that these two societies had achieved their prominence and prosperity by encouraging individual liberty, the rule of law, and free markets, and by discuraging the heavy, unpredicable hand of government intervention. It was this road to prominence and prosperiy that had been abandoned, in Hayek's mind, in favor of well-intentioned socialism borne from a desire to achieve "fairness", "equality", and other utopian goals, that posed a threat to the very individual freedom that had made those nations what they were.

I fear that Hayek's warnings have gone unheeded. We live in a society that has become increasingly reliant on the government to solve its problems, without any fear of the ramifications of such reliance. Rather than acting as an impartial referee in the individual pursuit of happiness, the government has sought to join in, and has, in the process, exerted a tightening grip on the individual liberty that used to define us as a nation. This is the source of my frustration with much of the world around me, and is, by extension, the source of this blog.