Posted by
Cato on Friday, March 20, 2009 1:43:44 PM
Normally, I am not that excitable but this news junkie is getting very worried. As a history professor, I am seeing too many familiar patterns that reflect forces which in other times and places have led to a loss of freedom. It may come to the point of armed resistance. I certainly hope not but we must, as our founders did, never completely rule it out as an option. It will of course be a sort of final option. Those who actually believe the principles in the founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Northwest Ordinance, Constitution, Federalist, Anti-Federalist Papers, and the Bill of Rights will never lightly resort to arms to protect our freedom. But as a nation we have fought many wars to preserve out way of life and, those of us who believe in the kind of government envisioned in our founding documents, will in all likelihood take up arms rather than see it destroyed. Almost daily we are seeing an administration, a congress, a judicial branch, and a federal bureaucracy that shows nothing but contempt for the obvious intent of our founders as revealed in the founding documents. Their purpose is to cement themselves in power as a permanent power and the consent of the governed be damned.
They like progressives in the past do not really believe in the consent of the governed. Instead, they believe in the "cult of the experts," with themselves or their friends as the experts. They, like Robespierre before them, seem to believe instead in a Rousseauian "Social Contract" with themselves as the perfect interpreters of the so-called "General Will." Of course the "General Will" according to Rousseau was not the will of the people but what would be in the best interests of the people. Many dictators have used this to establish arbitrary rule over the people, claiming to do it in the interest of the people. You see, they believe that only they really know how we should live our lives. They claim we are not capable of fending for ourselves without their guidance. This unmitigated arrogance, going all the way back to the French Enlightenment, shows their answer to the Protagorean dilemma.
In Ancient Greece, the Sophist Protagoras popularized the slogan "Man is the measure of all things" but this viewpoint almost immediately led to a problem. When human points of view conflict, whose view of things is right. Protagoras gave up on that and retreated into relativism, saying that all that really existed was useful opinion. Some of his followers decided that the answer lay in asserting that the measure was really the will of whoever had the power or influence to enforce his views on others. This is exactly where the left is coming from today. Their madness in this regard has long ago reached the point that they think nature and reality are bent automatically to their will. Why is a man-made global warming crisis "true" in spite of the growing evidence against it? It is "true" for them because they want it to be true. Why will socialist solutions yield different results now than they ever have historically? They will because they "want" them to. Why will it be true, for the first time ever, that a nation can spend its way out of debt? It will be "true" because they want it to be true. They truly, blindly believe that all the past failures of their ideas were simply because they were not the ones pushing the policies then. This time, their narcissitic arrogance tells them, it will work because "We are the ones we have been waiting for."
And, behind the scenes are the master manipulators of such people. People who want inflation and economic collapse for the opportunity it will give them to live out their dictatorial fantasies. These people, like Soros, Emanuel, and Obama, want inflation because that will give them the chance to destroy capitalism, to which they ascribe most of the evils in this world. But deep down it is really mostly about their own raw power.