Originally Posted by spence
It's only creepy if you take some irrational view that the Government is trying to control every aspect of our lives.
What is irrational is believing that government is, in theory a living thing as was an early tenet of progressivism expressed by Woodrow Wilson in order to give "life" to the Constitution and release American government from the limitations imposed by that Constitution. He said:
"The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of 'checks and balances.' The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing . . . No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live . . . Living constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission--in an era when 'development, evolution,' is the scientific word--to interpret the Constitution according th the Darwinian principle"
Eliminating the system of checks and balances destroys the dispersion of power in the central government creating a unitary power. And making government a living agent of changing times rather than a legal system limited by a fundamentally unchanging structure transforms it into, as Herbert Croly, another prominent progressive said in 1915:
"A thoroughly representative government [which] is essentially government by men rather than by law." And: "it is doubtful how far any system can be considered really representative which does not bestow complete responsibility for the public welfare upon the government. The government must have the power to determine the Law instead of being circumscribed by the Law."
It may not be that the "government is TRYING to control every aspect of our lives", but the administrative state which can determine the law, in effect, does that. The intentions may be good, but the result is not so much "effective liberty" as much as it is "effective tyranny" of the soft kind. The INTENTION of the Health Care Bill may not have been to control every aspect of our lives, but it gives "government" the power to do so by being able to dictate and regulate what you must buy. The irony of a living constitution that cannot be an organism that checks itself and still live, is that all living things eventually do die. It is immutable law that survives and gives permanence to a society and system of government. By applying a Darwinian principle, which in itself is outdated, to government, creates instability, constant change by whim, with no garantees to individuals or groups. And as history progresses at faster rates, the change in government and law do so as well, ultimately creating the possibility of new systems weekly.
The simple fact is that the mundane decisions of the mass might not always drive a positive result as there will always be biases.
Without a constant, unchanging Law, not only will the individual be subject to those biases we will all be ruled by them. And the individual, under progressive ideology is subservient to "the mass" and to the "living" government. As John Dewey, another prominent early progressive said in 1935:
"the only form of enduring social organization that is now possible is one in which the new forces of poductivity are cooperatively controlled and used in the interest of the effective liberty and cultural development of the individuals that constitute society; Such a social order cannot be established by an unplanned and external convergence of the actions of separate individuals, each of whom is bent on personal private advantage . . . Organized social planning, put into effect for the creation of an order in which industry and finance are socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide the material basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals, is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims."
And further stated by another early progressive, Frank Goodnow in 1916:
" . . .if under the conditions of modern life it is the social group rather than the individual which is increasing in importance, if it is true that greater emphasis should be laid on social duties and less on individual rights, it is the duty of the University to call attention of the student to this fact and it is the duty of the student when he goes out into the world to do what in him lies to bring this truth home to his fellows."
And what is to be the effect of progressive social organization? Woodrow Wilson summed it up nicely. First, as the other progressives have stated over and over, you must educate the public opinion to accept the transformation of government, which Wilson said might take three generations:
"Institutions which one generation regards as only a makeshift approximation to the realization of a principle, the next generation honors as the nearest possible approximation to that principle, and the next worships as the principle itself. It takes scarcely three generations for the apotheosis."
And then: " . . . until finally, a generation or two from now . . . there will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be discosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.""
The Borg.
To be honest I don't think most people are really aware of how their lives are really shaped by others.
-spence
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