I continuously hear pundits and talking heads reject any suggestion of free-market recovery with this shrill refrain: "But we can't just do nothing!" Notice the linguistic sleight of hand -- they are equating "we" with the feds. Apparently, if the feds aren't busy coercing us, then we are all just sitting on our hands doing nothing. The fact that they get away with this reveals our own abject lack of faith in ourselves as independent human beings. It also illuminates once again the widespread notion that there is no distinction between the political sector and civil society, a notion that Mussolini would gladly have endorsed. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
Calvin Coolidge was probably America's last president who actually governed within the Constitution's limitations. Considering that he left office in 1929, you can appreciate my lack of enthusiasm for mainstream politics. As the late, great George Carlin once observed, the reason it's called a "mainstream" is that it's so shallow.
Abraham Lincoln's sin was forgetting that the Union is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Because Lincoln forgot this (or willingly rejected it), he destroyed many of the true ends that the Union was designed to preserve. If the purpose of a fortress is to keep barbarians out, should I feel overjoyed that the fortress remains standing even after the barbarians have occupied it?
Every crackpot, interventionist, inflationary, and authoritarian scheme by the Obama administration might very well be constitutional, if Obama were a governor rather than a president. After all, governors possess far more (legal) authority within their jurisdictions than presidents do. Obama's lunacy would also be geographically contained, allowing Americans to flee to neighboring States and thereby deprive the Obama administration of revenues (which, in turn, would rapidly force Obama to re-think his thoroughly bankrupt ideology). But Obama holds a geographic monopoly and exercises illicit power, so he is an albatross hanging around our necks and pulling us under the waves. One saving grace is the division of sovereignty on the world stage, which will eventually flush out the lunacy (faster if countries compete, but more slowly if they try to coordinate their coercion).
Calvin Coolidge was probably America's last president who actually governed within the Constitution's limitations. Considering that he left office in 1929, you can appreciate my lack of enthusiasm for mainstream politics. As the late, great George Carlin once observed, the reason it's called a "mainstream" is that it's so shallow.
Abraham Lincoln's sin was forgetting that the Union is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Because Lincoln forgot this (or willingly rejected it), he destroyed many of the true ends that the Union was designed to preserve. If the purpose of a fortress is to keep barbarians out, should I feel overjoyed that the fortress remains standing even after the barbarians have occupied it?
Every crackpot, interventionist, inflationary, and authoritarian scheme by the Obama administration might very well be constitutional, if Obama were a governor rather than a president. After all, governors possess far more (legal) authority within their jurisdictions than presidents do. Obama's lunacy would also be geographically contained, allowing Americans to flee to neighboring States and thereby deprive the Obama administration of revenues (which, in turn, would rapidly force Obama to re-think his thoroughly bankrupt ideology). But Obama holds a geographic monopoly and exercises illicit power, so he is an albatross hanging around our necks and pulling us under the waves. One saving grace is the division of sovereignty on the world stage, which will eventually flush out the lunacy (faster if countries compete, but more slowly if they try to coordinate their coercion).
1 comments:
I liked this one.
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