Cute but Instructive

Nice little piece over at the Mises Institute by F.R. Buckley :

This raises some rhetorical questions. Didn't the Socialists get where they are by unreason? By nonsense even? Didn't their scurrilous name-calling, slander, smears, but above all, their appeal to sentiment – heart-rending pictures of evicted widows, starving coal miners, exploited sharecroppers – work to make "reasonable" men daily approve socialism?

We might ask: have we been too sober, too academic, too poker-faced, too scholarly, in trying to remind the world that freedom is good? Can't we tell a man why freedom is good in terms of his heart? A state of heart is affected by the food he eats, the sleep he gets, the woman he mates.

Logic can wear down opposition, but the slogan revolutionizes. "Give me liberty or give me death." This I can throw at you. It will hit you harder than all the pithy weight of Human Action.

It's worth the read.