Quote:
Originally Posted by Piscator
Does that make it right? Ad some substance to your posts!
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That seems to be a pattern for some--attempts to lampoon rather than discuss, which sort of defeats the purpose of a forum. Ridicule is fine if there is added substance.
I suspect that, to some degree, the matter of right and wrong for a "progressive" is relative. A political progressive would lean toward the belief that what the central government and its agencies do IS right. The whole purpose of the progressive movement was, and seemingly still is, the creation of an all-powerful benevolent government which would free its people from fear and want, thus liberating them to be whatever they desire and their potential allows. A discussion of the inherent contradictions in such a system and philosophy of government is a priori moot for progressives since that government would be comprised of the experts that know more and better than the people who merely are required to enjoy the freedom of their ignorance and the positive actions of their caretaker government. Things like musty old constitutions are too rigid and stand in the way of the progress toward the more perfectly equitable and just society. Daily, new problems that old constitutions could not foresee must be solved in new ways and can only be done by an unhampered bureaucracy which can more efficiently and expertly accomplish needed changes for a large and diverse populace. That all this truly resembles Woodrow Wilson's vision of a society resembling a beehive, and that it clusters the people into groups of dependents rather than the self-actuating individuals the structure purports to produce, and that it eliminates the friction necessary to create the pearl, and that it is actually, contrary to the progressive worship of evolution, anti-evolutionary and drifts toward the stagnancy of centalized control, and that the experience of history has shown time and again that an all-powerful government is not only tyrannical, but that the wish for a benevolent form of such government leads not to paradise, but to the diminution of the human spirit that separates us from the beehives and ant hills, that all these and more are irrelevant to progressives demonstrates that the unparalleled efficiencey which allows a centralized bureacracy with unlimited power to produce thousands of regulations per year makes such a system "right" compared to a cumbersome federal system bridled by the limitations of an unbending constitution.
And the progressive mind does not accept that immutable law garantees what it purports. It does not even recognize that its religion of science requires laws that don't change merely on whim or opinion, but must be based on evidence. The Constitution was written as a garantee of individual liberty and a bulwark against government tyranny. It was not meant to live and breath, for laws cannot be living organisms or they would be no more than the organisms to which they applied. And would be subject to the same ultimate fate of death and extinction. Even though experience and evidence has shown that individual liberty is harsh, difficult, demanding, it has also shown that subjection to central power is even more so, though attractive at first with utopian promises. Rather than adhere to the garantees of the Constitution, more and more are attracted to the promise of benevolence and the Constitution be damned. I can't fathom Justice Roberts decision--there is clearly no provision in the Constitution for the government to tax inactivity as well, which he recognized, as no provision to regulate inactivity through the commerce clause. Perhaps he has looked at the Constitution, looked at the "need" for "health care reform," and basically decided to tear up the Constitution and go with government's good intentions. He, like most other progressive judges, know that as the Constitution was written and intended it did not allow, but expressly forbade, in its enumerated limitations, central government hegemony over the individual. I can't be sure, but the unwillingness of those on this forum to discuss such matters indicates to me that such hegemony is OK.