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Wednesday, July 19. 2017

From Kimball's Populism, X: The imperative of freedom

Consider the different careers of the terms “democracy” and “populism.”

Do you know any responsible person who would admit to being opposed to democracy? No one who does not enjoy a large private income would risk it. But lots of people are willing to declare themselves anti-populist. The discrepancy is curious for several reasons...

In my mind, there are at least three founding principles of the United States that are far more important than the right to vote.

...

Government is our servant. The central, really very new concept on which this country was founded is that an individual's rights do not flow from government, but are inherent to man. That government in fact only makes sense to the extent that it is our servant in the defense of our rights, rather than as the vessel from which these rights grudgingly flow.

Posted by The Barrister in Politics at 14:26 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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The government is not just our servant, it's very existence flows from us, the people. Without our consent it could not be.

#1 Sennacherib on 2017-07-19 14:29 (Reply)

"That government in fact only makes sense to the extent that it is our servant in the defense of our rights, rather than as the vessel from which these rights grudgingly flow."

The founding of our country is based on the core principle that we have inalienable rights that flow from God. They are not granted by government, nor should they be taken away by government.

Thus the constitution provides that the federal government's rights are to be limited to the specific matters granted therein. The Tenth Amendment reserves all rights not specifically granted to the federal government to the states and the people respectively.

The federal government has run roughshod over that principle since the 1930s and it is getting worse and worse. (The primary tool has been construing the Commerce Clause to authorize almost any action by the federal government.) The worst abuse so far being Obamacare, which the majority of the Supreme Court held was beyond the power of Congress to enact even under the wide expanse of the Commerce Clause, but upheld anyway, on the bogus grounds that we could still be "taxed" for failing to follow an illegal law.

Concomitant with increasing its own power and denying our inalienable rights, government also must destroy the concept of God and His law as the foundation for our country. Thus the concerted effort to destroy the free exercise clause of the First Amendment and any expressions of faith in the public sphere.

#2 Jim on 2017-07-19 15:23 (Reply)

Words have a flavor to them, a connotation.

It's clear that The Mob can be encompassed as part of Democracy.

But it's also clear that Populism, while it can be democratic, is very much about the mob. Father Coughlin was a populist, not a small "d" democrat.

There is a difference. While democracy can run amok at times, it is generally restrained in our culture. On the other hand, one usually gets a whiff of the crowd's torches off the term populism.

To pretend the two words mean identical things, and to ignore their connotations, is either a little illiterate, or perhaps a sort of willful stupidity in order to make a political point.

But then feigning stupidity and intentionally misunderstanding others' arguments in order to score political points of our own is how we roll these days.

#3 Jablonski on 2017-07-19 17:04 (Reply)

The problem is that the founding fathers assumed that congress and the administration would actually abide by the constitution AND they assumed that if congress and/or the administration failed to abide by the constitution that a supreme court would force them to do so. All three legs of our government have failed this the primary duty, i.e. to abide by the constitution. It began as creeping disrespect for our constitution to outright disregard and contempt for it. What you see today is most of our elected and appointed politicians judges and bureaucrats using their power for political and monetary gain often openly and unafraid of any consequences.

The "free press" has become the handmaidens of the Democrat party and are all in with the free for all to loot the treasury and steal power from the people.

The biggest political scam now is to flood the country with immigrants and buy their votes with free stuff and continue to tax the middle class out of existence. I personally think this was pure genius on the part of Democrats and will likely succeed beyond their wildest dreams and within 20 years it will be impossible to stop or reverse it and our great republic will be destroyed from within.

#4 GoneWithTheWind on 2017-07-19 23:26 (Reply)

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Wednesday, July 19. 2017

Populism