Interstitial

Do you remember that part in the movie Pattonwhere General Patton is beating Rommel in a tank battle in North Africa? Patton yells out with gusto, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I READ YOUR BOOK.”

as free market libertarian conservatives who value true freedom, the freedom to live life without government interference and true equality, the equality of opportunity, we also have the opportunity to read “the book” of the progressives who are seeking single-mindedly to destroy those freedoms and opportunity. Here is the book:

if you haven’t purchased and read the book yet, then you need to do so. it is the best and most timely explanation for what it going on in our country’s politics right now. Progressives believe they have a moment in time within which to move the ball a great distance down the field and they are using that moment with all their might.

Here is Tiffany Jones Miller on the same theme. Please read the whole thing and then get the book

here is the contrast between the principles of our founding and the “principles” of the progressives:

The Founders’ understanding of the origin of government, in turn, proceeds from a recognition of the difficulty many individuals have in honoring the obligations that flow from the equality principle. Government is formed, in other words, for the express purpose of better enforcing this duty among men, thereby better securing the freedom of all. “If men were angels,” as Madison famously wrote in Federalist 51, “no government would be necessary.” Precisely because men are not angels, because many are strongly inclined to violate the rights of others when it is in their interest to do so, individuals consent to enter into the social compact, and establish government on the understanding it will use its powers to restrain those domestically and internationally who would violate their freedom. In principle, then, the power of government is not absolute but is limited to whatever actions are necessary to secure the natural rights of its members.

By rejecting the existence of natural rights, accordingly, the Progressives consciously repealed this limit: “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” Merriam observed, “but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle. . . . Each specific question must be decided on its own merits, and each action of the state justified, if at all, by the relative advantages of the proposed line of conduct.” In devising the content of the law, legislators need not worry about respecting the individual’s natural right to rule himself, because “there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way.”

emphasis added.

and here is the part where the progressives believe they are smarter than you and care more than you do so they should run your life:

Domestically speaking, if development were to occur on a wide scale, the “positive” State would have to replace limited or “negative” government. The problem with limited government, as Charles H. Cooley explained, is that it “does not enlist and discipline the soul of the individual.” By limiting its reach over the individual’s thought and behavior, it merely ensures the dominance of man’s more primitive or “self-regarding” impulses, which, in turn, produces social conditions that retard spiritual development. Promoting spiritual fulfillment more generally would entail recognizing, as Ely put it, that “the state [is] an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress.” Like a stern schoolmaster, government would have to take its pupils in hand and direct them to their proper destiny.

The Progressives’ zeal to promote their fellow Americans’ spiritual development, and thus to engineer social conditions more conducive to this goal, gave rise to an emphasis upon a host of objectives intermediate to this aim. The Progressives were keen to remove any social condition believed to frustrate the process of spiritual fulfillment, including, first and foremost, the problem of poverty. One of the leading problems with the free-market system, Ely explained, is that “on the one hand, we see those who are injured by a superfluity of economic goods; and, on the other, those who have not the material basis on which to build the best possible superstructure.” From the standpoint of spiritual fulfillment, in other words, the free market results in a mal-distribution of wealth; that is, a few individuals obtain more wealth than is good for them, and most obtain too little. The problem with the latter condition, with poverty, is not that it results in a materially less comfortable existence, but that it causes a host of conditions that restrict or stunt the spiritual progress of those in it. “Freedom of thought in a developed constructive form,” as Dewey and Tufts argued, “is next to impossible for the masses of men so long as their economic conditions are precarious, and their main problem is to keep the wolf from their doors. Lack of time, hardening of susceptibility, blind preoccupation with the machinery of narrowly specialized industries, the combined apathy and worry consequent upon a life maintained just above the level of subsistence, are unfavorable to intellectual and emotional culture.”

emphasis added.

does any of this sound the least bit familiar to you? It should. and it must stop. Get the book. Read it. Vote this November.

These meddling power hungry do gooders must be stopped before they ruin our country irreparably.