The Weekly Winston: On Liberalism and Socialism

I’m about to be on a cross-country flight from LA to Washington, which means I’ll be out of blogging range all day (unless the flight has WiFi–United is very slow in rolling this out).  So I might as well post my weekly Winston a day early.

So here’s more from Churchill’s famous speech of May 4, 1908 at Kinnaird Hall, Dundee, on the differences between liberalism (meaning classical and reform liberalism) and socialism (which is nearly indistinguishable today from what passes as liberalism, at least here in the U.S.) that I referenced here before:

And what is society?  I will tell you what society is.  Translated into concrete terms, Socialistic “society” is a set of disagreeable individuals who obtained a majority for their caucus at some recent election, and whose officials in consequence would look upon humanity through innumerable grills and pigeon-holes and across innumerable counters, and say to them, “Tickets, please.”  Truly this grey old world has never seen so grim a joke.

Well, at least not until Obama and Obamacare came along.

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