Posted by
Joseph O'Connell on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 10:32:32 PM
I have tried to sit down and write but time always gets away from me too quickly. So, in lifting a form idea from Sowell, I'll run through a few quick hits here that I have meant to post and hopefully down the road I shall elaborate on them in more detail. (I have only just placed these words on screen and will edit them tomorrow. When these parenthesis disappear, the editing is complete.)
The Constitution is an exceedingly small document for the purpose it was created. It's small because it was to restrain an exceedingly small body; the federal government of the United States. HR 3200 is massive because it is designed to control a large body; the American people.
A great many people mistake consensus of opinion with fact. But facts do not depend upon the opinions of mankind. Truth stands wholly apart from vindication by observation. Interpretation of evidence is an extrapolation or even invention of situations to match what is observed with some level of preconceived world-view.
Justice is the direct binding of action and result, a natural association of choice with consequence. Nothing is justified by the end result. The means are of at least equal if not greater import than ends. And the means, therefore, often justify the ends. Men who break the law lose their freedom in prison. That's an attachment of consequence to action and a statement against supremacy of results.
The right to life is not the right to continue breathing at any cost. It is the moral claim of individual and sovereign self-ownership. Simply put, the right is to 'my own life' and with that right comes the right and responsibility of self-actualization, self-determination, and property. This overarching right to life can be argued for on a number of different levels but I wish to note here that a human is a natural individual. It cannot tap into any collective will without intentionally aligning itself to such duties or without external and brutal force. It does everything, at some level, to match with its own set of goals, even if that appears to follow a unified goal with others.
Collectivism has an appeal in that it frees people from the rigors and disciplines of prudent behavior. Consider this; A leads to B which leads to C. Most of us understand that. If I fail to pay my mortgage (A), I will be foreclosed on (B), and will end up homeless (C). Concern over results guides my behavior to abide by my responsibilities. Yet, under a collective system, when results are 'evenly' distributed across the community, not only does the material wealth no longer have a bearing on input, intentions become the highest currency. In Barney Frank's mind, he could NEVER be responsible for the housing bust because he believes and has pushed for a socialization of lifestyle in America, therefore, the entire nation is responsible if anything.
This is turning into a bit of a non-few-statement blog post but allow me to elaborate a tad further. Remember what I said earlier, that no human operates outside his own individual goals? Well, Barney Frank, being a collectivist, could never associate himself with consequences because he's 'operating toward a collective good'. Yet, he blames Republicans (who should have shut down the GSEs) for the housing bust. Why? Because by and large the Republican party is NOT collectivist in nature. They are individualists and therefore are subject to the consequences of their actions (or in this case, subject to the consequences of Barney Frank's actions). It's important to realize, this is not merely an arrogant belief in the left's purity of intentions. It is a concerted effort to supplant human nature with a foreign construct of elitism.
The left regards anyone who disagrees with them as idiots while the right regards disagreement as a natural state of mankind. The right believes in liberty, therefore disagreement is associated a measure of competition within the principle of individual sovereignty. The left believes in collectivism and therefore associates disagreement with hatred toward the collective or to mere imbecility. In this situation the left will never regard the right as capable of intellectual debate because of the left's perpetual refusal to accept as intellectually worthy anything which is not collective in nature. The right, also, will never be able to regard the left as capable of proper debate because of the left's voluntary constraints within a collective ideal.