Another Tolkien Quote

A person who, I regret to say, represents me in the U.S. Senate is trying to push through a law aimed at attempts to escape U.S. taxes by leaving. I am somehow reminded of the following Tolkien quote:

Why should a man be scorned if, when finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or, if when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Partyspokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer's or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the ‘quisling’ to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say ‘the land you loved is doomed’ to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.

A difference between American conservatives and American liberals:

• American conservatives: America, love it or leave it!
• American liberals: America, we're not giving you a choice!

I just realized that the drone strikes on American citizens who left the country fit this pattern.