Tuesday
(0)Whatever happened to the phrase, which I believe was coined about a year ago by his überblogger highness, Glenn Reynolds, "A pack, not a herd" following his pointer to a Jonathan Rauch article?
If you recall, Reynolds attempted to show how the idea that there is a negative tradeoff between liberty and security is based on an error and that free societies, because they let citizens be vigilant as well as rationally self interested, are typically safer against threats than those in which folk assume the State will see to every issue.
What is so clever about Reynolds' argument is that it means that opponents of Big Government measures to make us 'safer', for by example, crackdowns on various civil liberites, can instead point to positive examples of people figuring out problems without the need for endless government programmes.
I think that coming up with lots of positive examples of how individual men and women have worked voluntarily with others to fix problems normally felt to the province of the State can do more to advance the cause of liberty than a library of classical liberal tracts.
And if there is a supreme British example of voluntarism, heroism and the advantages of encouraging a "can do" philosophy in our lives, it is surely that favourite of libertarians, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).
And the depressing question which arises for me is, if the RNLI were being contemplated now rather than in its time of birth in 19th Century Britain, would the health and safety bureaucrats try to kill it at birth?
Dear readers, you are ahead of me on that one.
Certainly the citizens on Flight 93 had more to do with the aircraft not ploughing into the Capitol or White House than the unarmed F-16s dispatched by the government.
"You guys ready? Let's roll." -- Todd Beamer, Flight 93.
Posted by Sean at February 18, 2004 12:51 AM
I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but perhaps volunteer fire departments are a good example. According to this site 73% of firefighters in the US are volunteers.
As a teenager in a rural area I watched with a mixture of amusement, pride, and concern whenever a Sunday morning fire caused many of the adult men in the congregation to slip quietly out the back during the middle of a church service.
Posted by John Swartz at February 18, 2004 03:30 AM
I'm surprised you haven't linked to the initial argument on "White Rose" that makes a very similar point.
(Link)http://whiterose.samizdata.net/wr_argument.html
Posted by rock at February 18, 2004 06:41 AM
A news story from somewhere in a Canada a few years ago--Halifax, I think--might fit the bill.
Apparently, there was a problem with panhandlers in the downtown shopping district. They were so numerous and assertive that they were driving away shoppers. The local retail businesses got together and built a shelter for homeless people. Then they put point-of-purchase donation boxes at all their checkout counters, with signs asking patrons to give to the shelter but not to individual panhandlers.
This achieved several worthwhile goals. The true homeless got a shelter. The shoppers got a legitimate, and conscience-assuaging, reason not to give to panhandlers. The store owners got their customers back. And the fake panhandlers lost their revenue stream.
Posted by Tedd McHenry at February 18, 2004 05:28 PM
