Tradition and Revolution

[Edmund] Burke’s complaint against the revolutionaries was that they assumed the right to spend all trusts and endowments on their own self-made emergency. Schools, church foundations, hospitals–all institutions that had been founded by people, now dead, for the benefit of their successors–were expropriated or destroyed, the result being the total waste of accumulated savings, leading to massive inflation, the collapse of education and the loss of traditional forms of social and medical relief. In this way, contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn…Through their contempt for the intentions and emotions of those who had laid things by, revolutions have systematically destroyed the stock of social capital, and always revolutionaries justify this by impeccable utilitarian reasoning.

-Roger Scruton, “How to Be a Conservative” (Kindle loc: 416; emphasis mine)