RUTHFULLY YOURS

Professors in the Brooklyn College political science department continue to amaze me with their doings. Today’s example is by Corey Robin, writing in the left’s The Nation.

The politics of freedom does not dismiss the value or importance of state resources. But rather than conceiving of them as protections against the hazards of the market or indices of public compassion, it sees them as sources of power, as the tools and instruments of personal and collective advance. Armed with universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, public pensions and the like, I am less vulnerable to the coercions and castigations of an employer or partner. Not only do I have the option of leaving an oppressive situation; I can confront and change it—for and by myself, for and with others. I am emboldened not to avoid risks but to take risks: to talk back and walk out, to engage in what John Stuart Mill called, in one of his lovelier phrases, “experiments in living.”
Uh, no mention that taxpayers and those who create wealth are to pay for his “freedom” to do what he pleases or to attack their selfishness. Robin would benefit from a bigger dose of freedom, by striking out on his own, without the tit that feeds him — as do real entrepreneurs.