Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is … - Rose Wilder Lane

I am not a prophet. But I do not believe that anything like a majority of Americans are looking for security; I do not believe that the groups of young radicals in the colleges and all over this country are in a ‘flight’ from socialization. I think they are furiously rebelling against it and determined to abolish it. I believe that their revolt is founded solidly on reality, as the similar socialist revolt of our youth was not; and I believe that they will succeed in overturning the status quo (as the socialist did) and end this century as Americans ended the 18th, in a great surge of liberalism, this time world-wide. I mean genuine liberalism. Since the socialists have stolen that good word, true liberals flounder all over the place, calling themselves ‘ libertarians’ and even ‘conservatives,’ but the accurate word, individualists, seems to be gaining ground lately.

[I]n a hotel lobby in Branson, Missouri, I met a young man almost in tears, totally woebegone and despairing. He had spent seventy days in Stone County, working day and night, he said, house to house, up hill and down, over those horrible roads; he’d gone to every house, he’d used every persuasion he could think of, talked himself hoarse, and he had not got even ONE man to take a $2,500 loan from the government; and those wretched people needed everything; why, their children were barefoot, some of them lived in log cabins—could I believe it? They NEEDED to be rehabilitated; I had no idea what rural slums they lived in; and here he offered them a loan from the Government—amortized, 25 years to pay it, more time if they wanted it; he offered them horses, and tools, even a car, anything almost and they just wouldn’t take it. They didn’t talk or act like such fools either. He couldn’t understand it. He HAD to get some of them to take Government help or he’d lose his job.

Freedom is not a permission granted by any Authority. Freedom is a fact. Whether or not this fact is known, freedom is in the nature of every living person, as gravitation is in the nature of this planet. Life is energy; liberty is the individual control of human life-energy. It can not be separated from life. Liberty is inalienable; as I can not transfer my life to anyone else, I can not transfer my liberty, my control of my life-energy, to anyone else.