Self-Reliance

Great quote on self-reliance from a biography of H.L. Mencken by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers.

Page 409-
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"By the mid-1930's, thanks to the New Deal, all that self-reliance had changed, prompting Mencken to declare: 'There is no genuine justice in any scheme of feeding and coddling the loafer whose only ponderable energies are devoted wholly to reproduction. Nine-tenths of the rights he bellows for are really privileges and he does nothing to deserve them.' Despite the billions spent on an individual, 'he can be lifted transiently but always slips back again.' Thus, the New Deal had been 'the most stupendous digenetic enterprise ever undertaken by man.... We not only acquired a vast population of morons, we have inculcated all morons, old or young, with the doctrine that the decent and industrious people of the country are bound to support them for all time. The effects of that doctrine are bound to be disastrous soon or late.'

When someone asked, "And what, Mr. Mencken, would you do about the unemployed?" He looked up with a bland expression. "We could start by taking away their vote," he said, deadpan. Mencken was not surprised when the majority disagreed. "There can be nothing even remotely approaching a rational solution of the fundamental national problems until we face them in a realistic spirit," he later reflected, and that was impossible so long as educated Americans remained responsive "to the Roosevelt buncombe."

"Buncombe," by the way, means either a county in North Carolina, a city in Illinois or another word for "nonsense."

Mencken

Submitted by wildcat on Tue, 02/19/2008 - 10:13am.

Your excerpt doesn't mention Mencken's thoughts regarding the population that truly can't take care of themselves. We are obligated, as fellow humans, to help them as their family members die and/or become unable to do so. Some people do the very best with what they've got (intellectually/physically/etc) and will never be able to take care of themselves. The capable, yet lazy, population I could careless about.

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That's because Mencken didn't care

Submitted by NUK_1 on Tue, 02/19/2008 - 3:24pm.

Mencken was a big believer in social darwinism, which is why he despised the New Deal and FDR so much as artificial means of interfering with reality. He also thought fundamentalists were complete suckers and seemed amused by the failings of people he thought were simply inferior intellectually. Mencken and Ayn Rand were definitely of the same mind and their writings pretty much birthed the political idea of libertarianism.

Some of the guy's stuff makes a ton of sense to me, but it's pretty harsh and not many people are going to salute that flag. I got the impression Mencken might have had some fascist ideals in the back of his head at times too.

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wildcat

Submitted by sageadvice on Tue, 02/19/2008 - 11:13am.

You know on the face of it, what you say about him and the helpless makes some sense---until one thinks!

So first, we do nothing to help them improve their life, then we wait for ALL of their relatives to die, then we wait for them to be thrown out into the road, then we put them in an asylum!

I don't know who makes all those judgments about who IS helpless, but I suppose Mencken would have liked to do so!
Nazis are good at that!

We all know who those are who rob instead of live poorly---there is no job for them except $8.00 per hour, part-time with no benefits.
That situation starts happening at Birth!

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