From: [bd 474] at [cleveland.Freenet.Edu] (Bill McDonald)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Clinton: "Americans Have Too Much Freedom"
Date: 21 Apr 1994 15:30:02 GMT


Last night on MTV's "Enough is Enough" (a program dealing with
crime and violence in America), a student from George Washington
University asked our president about Singapore's system of
government, noting that the Singaporian system does not base itself
on the strong belief in individual civil rights as ours does. The
questioner observed that Singapore and countries like it boast
extraordinarily low crime rates.  He asked "How do you account for that? 
Is our system outdated?  Does it need to be changed?"

             THE PRESIDENT:  Yes -- the young man, Michael Fay, in
Singapore.  As you know, I have spoken out against his punishment for
two reasons.  One is, it's not entirely clear that his confession
wasn't coerced from him.  The second is that if he just were to serve
four months in prison for what he did, that would be quite severe,
but the caning may leave permanent scars, and some people who are
caned, in the way they're caned, they go into shock.  I mean, it's
much more serious than it sounds.  So, on the one hand, I don't
approve of this punishment, particularly in this case.

             Now, having said that, a lot of the Asian societies that
are doing very well now have low crime rates and high economic growth
rates, partly because they have very coherent societies with strong
units where the unit is more important than the individual, whether
it's the family unit or the work unit or the community unit.

             My own view is that you can go to the extreme in either
direction.  And when we got organized as a country and we wrote a
fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a
radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed
that the Americans who had that freedom would used it responsibly.
That is, when we set up this country, abuse of people by government
was a big problem.  So if you read the Constitution, it's rooted in
the desire to limit the ability of government's ability to mess with
you, because that was a huge problem.  It can still be a huge
problem.  But it assumed that people would basically be raised in
coherent families, in coherent communities, and they would work for
the common good, as well as for the individual welfare.

             What's happened in America today is, too many people
live in areas where there's no family structure, no community
structure, and no work structure.  And so there's a lot of
irresponsibility.  And so a lot of people say there's too much
personal freedom.  When personal freedom's being abused, you have to
move to limit it.  That's what we did in the announcement I made last
weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have
weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer
in their communities.  So that's my answer to you.  We can have --the
more personal freedom a society has, the more personal
responsibility a society needs, and the more strength you need out of
your institutions -- family, community and work. 

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