Do you want to survive -- or do you want to live???

The State as Benefactor


WALL·E (2008)
AUTO: Sir, orders are do not return to Earth.
Captain: But life is sustainable now. Look at this plant. Green and growing. It's living proof he was wrong.
AUTO: Irrelevant, Captain.
Captain: What? It's completely relevant. [moves toward the window]
Captain: Out there is our home. *HOME*, Auto. And it's in trouble. I can't just sit here and-and-do nothing. [moves back toward Auto]
Captain: That's all I've ever done! That's all anyone on this blasted ship has ever done. Nothing!
AUTO: On The Axiom, you will survive.
Captain: I don't want to survive. I want to live.
AUTO: Must follow my directive.

Give Me Liberty by Rose Wilder Lane (1936)
No one who dreams of the ideal social order, the economy planned to eliminate waste and injustice, considers how much energy, how much human life, is wasted in administering and in obeying the best of regulations.
No one considers how rigid such regulations become, nor that they must become rigid and resist change because their underlying purpose is to preserve men from the risks of chance and change in flowing time.
Americans have had in our country no experience of the discipline of a social order.
We speak of a better social order when in fact we do not know what any social order is.
We say that something is wrong with this system, when in fact we have no system.
We use phrases learned from Europe, with no conception of the meaning of those phrases in actual living experience.