![]() Thankfully, after searching around a bit, I was able to find a digital version of it here. Not even a link to where I could find it elsewhere. They don’t include the letter, or even a large quotation, in either article. If you give me the actual letter, I can see the context quite well myself, thank you. Problem is, I’m not really all that interested in their personal opinions. They paraphrase things in their own words and talk about what that the documents mean. Oh yes, the articles (read them here and here if you want) certainly reference original documents. (As those of you who know me are probably aware, random research is basically what I do for fun.)īut I immediately encountered a far-too-common problem: NO ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS. In the words of of Inigo from Princess Bride: In fact, he implies, it is closer to the opposite. Wittes claims that this context means Franklin was not actually talking about liberty as we think of it, but about money and defense, and that the quote therefore doesn’t really apply to most of the causes it is commonly attached to. The original quote comes from a 1755 letter about taxation and defense during the French and Indian war, in which Franklin is urging the governor to pass a bill sent to him by the legislature, and along the way arguing that the influential Penn family shouldn’t object to being taxed, along with everybody else, to raise funds for the defense of the frontier border of their state. The top two results both quote Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, basically saying that the quote is being taking out of context and completely misused. Look what happened when I googled some key words to find the quote: But was that kind of meaning what Franklin actually had in mind? And though I haven’t actually seen it, I’m sure somebody has used it to argue against the shelter-in-place orders in the current crises. The quote is often used to argue against things like like government surveillance of citizens. ![]() Seems like a pretty straightforward quote, right? If you give up your liberties by trading them to purchase some kind of temporary safety, you don’t deserve either. Today, I want to talk about a quote that is very popular among libertarians and others who worry about government overreach: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” So great, in fact, that over 200 years later, people still love to throw them around. But there is no doubt that he left an astounding number of great quotes for posterity. The man himself was a mixed bag, and if I’d known him personally I would probably have had serious issues with some of his behavior.
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