by Matt Barr

Love it and leave it

Perry de Havilland's post today at Samizdata is wrenching. To think that for about five minutes after September 11 was settling in, I was in favor of national ID cards here. Now, they'll be the law in Britain, in an execrable infringement on civil rights.

I am on the e-mail list of the Free State Project, referenced in Perry's post, though with my wife suffering from Scleroderma (cold = bad) and kids in school, the chances of our emigrating there are slim the next 15 years or so. I'm glad Perry's chosen that destination and hope the FSP meets all its goals. With less organization, the opposite happened to Vermont, after all. Anything can happen.

A moment of silence for Our Oldest Friends, the Brits. Here, Lincoln promised that government by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth; he delivered on that promise because Charles Francis Adams kept the Brits from taking the South's side in the Civil War. There, Churchill said:

Still if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

Or move to New Hampshire. Back here, Warren Zevon wrote: "Life'll kill ya, wherever you go. Requiescat in pace, that's all she wrote." R.I.P. civil liberty in Britain; I hope and pray Perry finds a haven here in 2007 or so and not a like society.

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