"Ask not"

George Will spoke today at the libertarian Cato Institute upon the event of the publication of his new book, One Man’s America. I was able to attend with my mother—it was a inspiring speech—and have a book signed for my father, who twice a week for as long as I can remember has chuckled as he read Will’s columns syndicated in the New York Post.

I don’t mind being a secondhand dealer in ideas, particularly being young and in the blogosphere, but it does seem a disservice to hack apart and reconstitute Will. Suffice to say he laid out differences between conservatism and libertarianism, had a great quip about Obama (“The rhetorical cotton candy, although fun to eat, is not nourishing”), and, at a time when personal responsibility, thrift and self-sufficiency—the stern virtues that are a prerequisite for democratic capitalism—are eroding in the face of the metastasizing entitlement mentality, offered an alternative. When JFK said ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’ one sensible response is to “reserve a spacious portion of your own life for which you, not your country, are responsible.”