“Decent People Helping Tyrants”

“Decent People Helping Tyrants”
Walter Williams’s 1999 collection, More Liberty Means Less Government; specifically, it’s from Walter’s July 1997 essay “Decent People Helping Tyrants”:
In pursuit of what’s deemed as worthy objectives, decent people often pave the way for tyranny.
The process usually begins by the piecemeal destruction of the foundations of liberty: private property, rule of law, voluntary exchange, and limited government.  Those basic rights often stand in the way of do-gooders’ objectives.
Once those foundations have become seriously eroded, it’s an easy matter for egoists and tyrants to take over and produce an agenda quite different from do-gooder intentions.

JUSTIN KATZ: “It’s difficult not to have a surreal feeling watching the world go by in the shadow of the growing monolith of Obama Administration scandals. Some of the government actions that have come to light would have been universally understood as signs of encroaching tyranny just a few years ago.”