Reflections From a Murky Pond

Ayn Rand, one of the few staunch literary defenders of individual liberty and robust American capitalism and excellence, had much to say about the goals of the Leftists, these Liberals and Progressives:

The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli.

– Ayn Rand
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

I happen to disagree with her. Insofar as I can see, statism is the chosen methodology of the Liberals and Progressives, not the goal. A giant, all-encompassing, intrusive government is merely, to them, a necessary means to an end.

There goal is to have a “state” without national identity, pride, or identifiable culture where all of the people’s sundry needs and most desires are either fulfilled or guaranteed by the government. They wish to bring about an egalitarian Utopia where merit and circumstance have no bearing upon one’s material success.

Statism, despite Rand’s assertion, is just the only means by which the Leftists believe they can bring about this unnatural state of being. They simple need a despotic central force to enact and maintain their fantasy of a neo-Socialist, fully managed society.

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The inability to learn from other fools’ mistakes is one of the hallmarks of the Leftists. Liberals and Progressive can and do stand among the wreckage of failed states and rant that America should do as they had done because it’ll work this time and it’s the right thing to do.

And so Americans get saddled with Obama, the poster man-child for this sort of “short bus” un-thinking, shuffling and jabbering away at all the “appropriate” talking points and whining for the same failed courses of action in order to keep his job.

But that’s the problem with universal suffrage; the lunatics and defectives who just can’t learn to differentiate between their delusions and objective reality keep trying to run the asylum and, when not controlled or culled, run it straight into the ground.

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In any society that hopes to maintain its liberty and avoid tyranny it is necessary for its people to instill fear in its political leadership. In best case scenarios this needs only be the fear of the consequences of misbehavior. In other all too common situations it is necessary to fill the politicians with the fear of reprisals by the people.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

– Attributed to Thomas Jefferson

America is at a point where it is dealing with a middle case scenario where politicians need to be instilled with a combination of preventative and punitive fears.

Fortunately, Americans have exercised some of the means at their disposal to instill the needed fear in the political elite. They banded together as the TEA Parties and elected representatives to Congress who were of strong purpose and character.

In the degenerate system that America’s federal government has devolved into, honest and patriotic men an women who have chosen to shoulder the burden of providing correction to that system and who are willing to disregard the personal cost to themselves for doing so are an acute source of fear for all the professional politicians who are heavily invested, often literally, in maintaining the current broken status quo.

Nothing scares professional politicians more than actual statesmen, and nothing scares the Liberals and Progressives more than American statesmen, even though they whine and rant when their own sort don’t behave similarly.

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