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Comment by madhadron | Hacker News Reader

Be careful with lists of quotes like this. Go back and examine the full context of the text and what the text was being written for. I have in many cases followed up on such quotes and found that the surrounding text made them mean something entirely different or sometimes even the opposite.

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That is very true. I plucked 5 or so statements from that list by people I have read other quotes/letters from that support those statements.

Thank you.

Case in point: when Ben Franklin argued "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.", he was actually arguing for the authority of the Federal government to tax the states in order to fund a frontier defense against Native American raids[0, 1], not making some general crypto-minarchist statement about the dangers of ceding personal liberty to the authority of governments.

[0]https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/14/how-the-world-butchered-be...

[1]https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...

The context doesn't make what Franklin meant any different.

What? The context shows that what Franklin meant is completely the opposite of what people claim.

He wasn't warning against the dangers of giving up one's rights to the creeping authoritarianism of the state, he was complaining that people were giving up the "essential Liberty" provided by an effective Federal government for the "temporary safety" purchased by refusing to fund it.

Or to quote from the NPR article, "(...) far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation."

Nah. It's a really shallow analysis to call his statement "pro-taxation and pro-defense spending", and far more of an inaccurate generalization than how the quote's usually used. Franklin was writing to answer the problem of the governor being bribed by the Penns to provide security and veto the taxation, rather than the state using its legitimate authority to tax the Penn's lands and provide that security. The alternative was undermining the integrity of the democratic state, not "refusing to fund it".

Interestingly enough, the context is being used here to invert the meaning of Franklin's beliefs, rather than clarify them.

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