Is the "common good" - as if there were one of those - best served by freedom or by government expansion and intrusion?
Both Dems and Repubs are guilty of the latter, but during the Obama years it has reached a fever pitch. The EPA, the Dept of Education, the NSA, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the IRS - etc. Why aren't these expansions of power - oppression really by our moral and intellectual superiors - over the individual, frightening to our political "leaders" of any stripe? Why not frightening to the mainstream press? Government has the power and the guns - and our money.
The federal government is out of control. Where are the Minutemen?
I have very little paranoid tendencies, but I am far more uneasy about what is happening here in the US than about ISIS or Russia or Syria or whatever other crappy shitholes where people can't or do not wish to get civilized. Israel can take care of itself, however it feels best.
Hinkle says this: (my bolds)
One might think the small-government liberal shows up in the realm of personal choice. And it is true that on one very narrow band of issues — sex and abortion — liberals agree government should butt out. Yet this is where the butting-out largely ends.
For while liberals largely support, say, the legalization of marijuana, that is not owing to any broader sense that people own their bodies and should be free to do as they like with them — such as ride a motorcycle without a helmet, or engage in sex for profit, or drink a 64-ounce sugary soft drink, or forgo health insurance.
Rather, the contemporary mainstream liberal view of such things holds that individual choices affect the collective good. And since government’s job is to safeguard the collective good, government should therefore regulate individual choices. If it allows people to smoke marijuana, that is because it has decided a little reefer now and then causes less collective harm than the harm caused by prohibition.
In other words, the mainstream Democratic view asks how much personal freedom smart public policy should permit. It has little room for the notion that some personal freedom should lie beyond the reach of public policy in the first place.
Does that seem too strong? Then consider the campaign to eviscerate the First Amendment. Democratic leaders such as John Kerry, Sen. Patrick Leahy, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and many others — including countless grass-roots activists — want to amend the Constitution to nullify the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, so the government can once again dictate what people can and cannot say about politicians in the weeks leading up to an election. Tellingly, the proposals include provisions stipulating that the press would still be allowed to speak freely about political candidates.
This is a tacit concession that everyone else would not. In that event, rights are no longer trumps; they are simply one more consideration to be balanced against all the rest. Which means they are not really rights at all.
In short, the Democratic Party is torn between a liberal establishment that wants more government, and an even more liberal wing that wants the same thing squared. At bottom, both wings believe the formula for perfection is simple: Put the government in charge of everything, and put the right people in charge of the government. Then just sit back and wait for Shangri-La.
Related at Zero: The primary problem with centralized power is that sociopaths
(for obvious reasons) gravitate toward, and greatly covet, positions of
power
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