'Yes, sorry, yer 'onour, but I can't 'elp meself, see!' Imagine that as delivered through a nasal whine, but I'm not really acting because today we have some seriously genuine 'global warming' and I just can't spend all day up here tippy-tapping, after all, I have a superb tanned body to keep in a state of God-like, bronzed beauty - sorry, did you say something? However, I am conscious that some of you click on to Duff & Nonsense regularly if only to seek solace in the fact that there is actually someone dimmer than you! Anyway, I am grateful to Cafe Hayek for finding a superb quotation from a 19th century legal intellectual, Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, who was, I am quick to tell you before 'DM' chips in, born in Scotland:
“Yet nothing is more certain, than that the mental picture which enchains the enthusiasts for benevolent democratic government is altogether false, and that, if the mass of mankind were to make an attempt at redividing the common stock of good things, they would resemble, not a number of claimants insisting on the fair division of a fund, but a mutinous crew, feasting on a ship’s provisions, gorging themselves on the meat and intoxicating themselves with the liquors, but refusing to navigate the vessel to port.”
Splendid fella', how right he was! But even greater joy followed my theft of that quote, in fact, the equivalent of an unlocked house to a Blog-burglar like me, yet another quote from Cafe Hayek from the same man:
Perhaps we are not at liberty to forget that there are two kinds of bribery. It
can be carried on by promising or giving to expectant partisans places paid out
of the taxes, or it may consist in the directer process of legislating away the
property of one class and transferring it to another.
There, my petty larceny is at an end and I throw myself upon the mercy of the court!
