I am going to try to resume my periodic “Quote of the Day” posts with interesting tidbits from my current reading. I have been occasionally been doing this with screen shots posted on Twitter, but I want to bring them back here to the blog.

Today’s quotation is from Auberon Herbert: Selected Writings from a Reluctant Anarchist. Herbert was a staunch advocate of individual liberty who lived in England in the late 19th century. This particular passage deals with the idea, becoming popular in his day, of the government providing for all the wants and needs of the people. Given the state of today’s political landscape, his thoughts are just as relevant today.

So long as great government departments (over which, be it observed, from the very exigencies of administration, the mass of the people can never have any real control) supply our wants, so long shall we remain in our present condition, the difficulties of life unconquered, and ourselves unfitted to conquer them. No amount of state education will make a really intelligent nation; no amount of Poor Laws  will place a nation above want; no amount of Factory Acts  will make us better parents. These great wants which we are now vainly trying to deal with by acts of Parliament, by prohibitions and penalties, are in truth the great occasions of progress, if only we surmount them by developing in ourselves more active desires, by putting forth greater efforts, by calling forth new moral forces into existence, and by perfecting our natural ability for acting together in voluntary associations.

I always find it fascinating to discover that things we often think of as being a modern problem have existed in virtually the same form for quite some time. If only more people would realize that the problems we face today are, largely, not new we would have a better chance of learning how those in past attempted to deal with the problem and, more importantly, what the results were.

As philosopher and political theorist Edmund Burke put it in the 18th century, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”