Priorities
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Schools have time and money to send home fat letters, whether the kids actually are fat, or not. Part of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign?
Schools have time and money to run prevention programs about cyber-bullying.
But schools graduate little more than half their students. And how many of them actually know anything, versus got passed along by the system?
Plainly, schools need more money. For the children.
Joe Doakes
It’s always worked so well before.
October 14th, 2013 at 10:17 am
I’ve always equated liberalism with the desire to leave the individual free to live his or her life according to his or her abilities and desires. This implies equality of opportunity, not of outcome. It implies the right of people to act in ways that may seem foolish or immoral to the majority, as long as those acts do not impinge on freedom of others. It implies that free individuals will both fail and succeed, that there will be rich and poor. It implies a strong sense of personal responsibility for one’s actions.
October 14th, 2013 at 10:51 am
Emery, you’re talking about Classical Liberalism, the kind espoused by Thomas Jefferson, which is now called Libertarianism or Conservatism or more simply, “hate speech.”
People who now call themselves Liberals believe a better society will arise because of the Federal Reserve, progressive income tax, inheritance tax, civil forfeiture, light rail funded by gas tax, regulated broadcasting, zoning, desegration, naturalization of agriculture through price supports, naturalization of the auto and health care industries, and government control of all learning through the Department of Education. Marx is grinning his head off in his grave to see his success.
October 14th, 2013 at 10:55 am
Emery … Thanks for the short walk down memory lane. As a child in the 60’s, I recall “free love,” “Do your own thing,” and a general distaste, dislike, and distrust of anything governmental (“the Man”) among the left’s buzz words, mantras, and beliefs, most often chanted by the radicals/ hippies of that era. Did we all reverse our beliefs, or did The Merry Pranksters just switch the political affiliation labels when no one was looking?
October 14th, 2013 at 11:28 am
“It implies a strong sense of personal responsibility for one’s actions.”
This Darwinian principle would probably work if those people actually died off from their poor choices. Instead they tend to rack up the healthcare costs for the nation…
October 14th, 2013 at 12:57 pm
This Darwinian principle would probably work if those people actually died off from their poor choices. Instead they tend to rack up the healthcare costs for the nation…
… and get elected to office.
October 14th, 2013 at 3:21 pm
Freedom of association is always the enemy of these statists. It implies that the individual has supremacy over the state, or at least that he or she has interests that the state cannot override.
October 14th, 2013 at 3:22 pm
Had I substituted the word Liberalism with Libertarianism and my 1st post would have been just as accurate.
Note the distinction: liberalism is basically about having individual freedom guaranteed by governments; libertarianism is about having that freedom through as little government involvement as possible. The fact that each ideology can be seen as both leftist and rightist, depending on the context, is a symptom of the confusion over what they really mean.
It could be confusion over what left and right mean that allows both liberalism and libertarianism to be seen as both left and right. My own definition is that libertarianism is what we believe when someone knocks on our door and liberalism is what we believe when we go next door.
October 14th, 2013 at 4:02 pm
I am not certain that you understand the difference between positive and negative rights, Emery. If the state protects behavior that is unpopular, just who does it represent?
October 14th, 2013 at 7:44 pm
The US system protects minority rights very well.
October 14th, 2013 at 10:18 pm
I think you’re confusing responsibilities with various negative rights. Jefferson and the constitution lay out various areas where government power should be constrained, areas where the will of the majority do not trump the rights of individuals, area where government can not use its power. That may be the most important feature of a particular kind of government, but it is not the first responsibility of government. No government has ever been formed for the primary purpose of protecting the people from itself. If that were the case, why form the government in the first place? The answer is that all governments, democratic or otherwise, are formed to protect the people from external threats and maintain order, i.e. to protect people against acts of violence. Because a government formed to counter violence is itself a threat to use violence on the people, constitutional checks are desirable. But that does not change the simple fact that the first responsibility of any government is to protect the people from acts of violence, external and internal. All of the other issues of how to best govern start from that initial truism.
October 14th, 2013 at 10:52 pm
But, Emery, you wrote:
“Note the distinction: liberalism is basically about having individual freedom guaranteed by governments”
Liberalism is very much about positive rights. C.F. modern liberalism and Roosevelt’s “four freedoms”. The founders did not believe in positive rights originating from the Federal Government. State governments have plenary powers. The Federal constitution forbids them very little. They must have republican forms of government, cannot issue titles of nobility, must defer to the federal government in trade and defense matters, etc.
When you combine a federal government that believes in positive rights, such as the right to ‘access to healthcare’, you are doing something very bad. You are committing the Federal government, the level of government least responsive to democratic impulses, to the project reordering American society to suit itself.
October 15th, 2013 at 6:36 am
But, Terry, you wrote:
“I am not certain that you understand the difference between positive and negative rights, Emery.”
I think the problem is: your hat fits too tight…