“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”
. . . like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have your freedom–if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant.
After I linked to reviews about Harry Potter’s Libertarianism and to the different approaches for individualism and struggle to preserve liberty in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Ring it is just natural to link to this interesting review of Robert Heinlein’s legacy in the Wall Street Journal:
Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988, lived a life inspired by two great loves. One was America and its promise of freedom. As one of his characters put it: "Your country has a system free enough to let heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time–unless its looseness is destroyed from the inside." And he loved and admired women–not just his wife, Virginia, who provided the model for the many strong-minded and highly competent females who populate his stories, but all of womankind. "Some people disparage the female form divine, sex is too good for them; they should have been oysters."
In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief that "this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency."
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Rogel @ July 27, 2007