Hobgoblins

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken, 1923

We were listening to a talk show on the radio one Saturday morning,  a few weekends ago, and this quote was mentioned in relation to the H1N1 flu. I’m not going to get into a debate on whether we should or shouldn’t get the flu shot here. I know there are valid arguments on both sides of the issue.

So I researched an article by James Waddell, a financial analyst in New York (when the article was written).  He basically asserts that there is always some impending catastrophe that, without the government’s intervention, may cause us all  to perish.  Or so they would have us all believe. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. Think about it.

Waddell  mentions other hobgoblins, past or present:   Capitalism, alcohol, pesticides, biotechnology (As he states, “just about anything that makes our lives easier, or our food cheaper and more abundant.”),  cell phone usage, and the list goes on.

Take global warming. Oh, we don’t call it that, anymore. Now it’s ‘climate change’ because obviously there are cooling trends, too. But without gov’t intervention (laws and penalties), we are led to believe that all forms of life will die.

I leave you with this thought-provoking quote by Waddell “As long as men seek power, they will use fear as a means to obtain that power. So, new hobgoblins will appear all the time, and many old ones will get resurrected. But when they do, give my approach a try. As soon as I hear about a new scare, I immediately assume that it's phony. The scarier it sounds, the more I am sure that there is absolutely nothing to it. I then read about it as the weeks pass by, and see if any real facts appear that
might change my mind. It almost never happens. Hobgoblins,
after all, are just imaginary.”

Food for thought.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/waddell4.html