Unsatisified

Today via Sully we see an article about Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter Rose, who, after early flirtations with communism and bohemia, settled into a nice -ism of not helping the poor, enough with the fucking handouts etc (she saw the New Deal as a reason to not only pray for FDR's assassination, but considered doing it herself.) Her saving grace is that she couldn't quite pull the trigger on being as Ayn Randy-y as Rand herself, as Sully points out in his post.

Meanwhile, as you faithful readers already know, Xmastime has long rolled his eyes at Tea Partying "libertarians" who like to claim how high they'd fly if only the government would disappear, and that there's nothing about their daily lives that are enriched or even made possible by the government. So of course I take interest in this paragraph:

The Wilders had, in fact, received unacknowledged help from their families, and the Ingallses, like all pioneers, were dependent, to some degree, on the railroads; on taxpayer-financed schools (Mary’s tuition at a college for the blind, Hill points out, was paid for by the Dakota Territory); on credit—which is to say, the savings of their fellow-citizens; on “boughten” supplies they couldn’t make or grow; and, most of all, on the federal government, which had cleared their land of its previous owners. “There were no people” on the prairie, Laura, or Rose, had written. “Only Indians lived there.”

Even the poster child of hardscrabble frontierism needed a lot of help, help she probably wasn't even aware or conscious of in the same was we don't think much about any road we drive on or stamp we buy for however insanely inexpensive it is to send a letter thousands of miles away. Self-reliance is, as Paul Westerberg once said about freedom, a lie.