The Hobbit Party Quotes

“this degraded view of custom and courtesy, far from being merely cosmetic, threatens our capacity to sustain culture and forge authentic connections with other people and peoples.16 The loss of courtesy in the older and richer sense of the term signals a growing inability to connect with anyone but our own increasingly limited selves.”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“Gene Logsdon is equally critical of the federal government’s interference with regional farming markets. In The Contrary Farmer,20 he explores how government manipulation of agricultural markets has led to costly, hare-brained, and environmentally damaging practices. For example, farmers are tempted by government subsidies to grow corn on land far better suited for other, unsubsidized crops. The end result: the agricultural and economic diversity of whole regions of the United States is diminished. This has the knock-on effect of undermining opportunities for people in these regions to obtain a variety of affordable, locally grown produce. People talk about addressing such problems by further regulating lobbyists, but every new wave of regulations seems only to make matters worse. The best way to avoid cronyism and the government manipulation of markets in favor of corporate bigness is to have big government shrunk down to size and hemmed in by severe limits.”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“In this way, The Hobbit gets something right that many people on both the right and left miss—namely, that the defining characteristic of free enterprise isn’t greed or lawlessness, but freedom under justice.”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“we shouldn’t approach a great work of art cynically or violently, as many postmodern critics do when they dive into a work of literature in order to “deconstruct” it and hold up the remaining parts as evidence of sexism, classism, the patriarchal superstructure, et cetera, ad nauseam. Instead, we should recall that we have a moral obligation, informed and enriched by our religious traditions, to engage the artist attentively and respectfully—not in a way that checks our own moral intuitions and convictions at the door, but also not in a way that expects only to find dated ideas with the scent of mothballs about them. Back to text.”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“freedom is always at risk, and democracy is no cure-all. It’s been said that “a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government” because eventually “voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury . . . with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”10”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“This is the soft despotism that an earlier writer, Alexis de Tocqueville, warned could “take hold in the very shadow of the sovereignty of this people”. He foresaw in the “nations of Christendom . . . an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal” and above them “stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly disposed”, a ruling power that “spreads its arms over the whole of society, covering the surface of social life with a network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules” until it “reduces each nation to nothing more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as shepherd.”6”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“The kind of Evil which Sauron embodies, the lust for domination, will always be irrationally cruel since it is not satisfied if another does what it wants; he must be made to do it against his will.”37”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“The lesson is old and oft forgotten: even well-intentioned leaders are tempted to annex to themselves more and more power in their efforts to fight evil and improve the lot of their people. In such cases, the potential for good lies in plain sight, while the danger of unchecked power seems distant, abstract, and quite manageable.”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“We have been trained to sing about liberty while blithely acquiescing to policies and politicians that deny liberty.”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot

“The most improper job of any man, even saints, is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”
― Jay Richards, The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom That Tolkien Got, and the West Forgot