Ten Ways Progressive Policies Harm Society's Moral Character

Agree with him or not, this piece by Dennis Prager is a good example of writing with clarity (I sometimes think his writing would be better with more examples, but I thought this piece was well-written for a short summary). Read the whole thing. As usual with Prager, I didn't find a single "weasel word" in the piece.  Kicker at the end.

If you'd rather watch a video, he did short one with the same theme earlier. I hope that most people would fall somewhere between the extremes in how much government they think is good:   no government (true anarchy with its risks of destruction) and really big government (national or international egalitarian government with its risks of totalitarianism).  But about the only people agitating for anarchy today are faux anarchists who want to see Western Civilization fall so they can build a new, utopian system.  Progressive policies which lead toward really big government, on the other hand, remain popular.  The ten moral downsides which Prager identifies are:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another.

The greatest description of American civilization was written in the 19th century by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. One of the differences distinguishing Americans from Europeans that he most marveled at was how much Americans — through myriad associations — took care of one another.

2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme.

As a result, virtually every welfare state in Europe, along with many American states, like California, is going broke.

3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic.

4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work.

5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing.

And the rhetoric of liberalism — labeling each new entitlement a “right” — reinforces this sense of entitlement.

6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption.

Of course, big businesses are also often corrupt. But they are eventually caught or go out of business. The government cannot go out of business. And, unlike corrupt governments, corrupt businesses cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation’s currency, and they cannot arrest you.

7. The welfare state corrupts family life.

8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults.

9. As a result of the Left’s sympathetic views of pacifism, and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world’s evils and even to defend them.

10. The leftist weltanschauung sees society’s and the world’s great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil.

This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.

Bastille Day and La Marseillaise

I was thinking yesterday that it's a wonder that La Marseillaise is still the French National Anthem: "To Arms, Citizens", etc. Doesn't quite fit with the current culture of Social Democracy and multiculturalism in Europe. Does any Western country have a fiestier National Anthem? Or a more rousing one? The version from Casa Blanca reminds us that tyranny is a recurring danger.  On the other hand, Bastille Day also reminds us that revolutions don't always turn out as hoped.  

Walter Russell Meade is on a roll. He has a wonderful piece about the Fall of the Bastille.  

Anyway, for your holiday reflections, five takes on the French Revolution : Charles Dickens, Maximilien Robespierre, Albert Camus, the Marquis de Lafayette and your Via Meadia host.

I hope that a significant percentage of high school and college students still knows who Dickens, Robespierre, Camus and Lafayette were.

Maximilien Robespierre:
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror.

And of course, terror got a little out of hand during the French Revolution and eventually took even Robespierre's life.* I don't know if Meade intended a connection, but he also put up a short post on the Spirit of Marie Antoinette Alive and Well in the Hamptons. Heh.

* A great deal of the terror came as the result of the attempt to "purify" the country with regard to egalitarianism, (which takes "equality" far beyond the American Founders' emphasis on Equality Before the Law) and other principles which animated the revolutionaries.

It's remarkable to me how many 20th Century tyrants from around the world spent time in Paris before embarking on their careers of tyranny. Many of those tyrants also espoused the idea of "purifying" their own countries. Not something you would expect when visiting modern-day France.

Happy Independence Day

Well, Calvin Coolidge seems to be popular today, on account of his thoughts at the 150th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. Jeff Jacoby discusses President Coolidge's speech:

Since ancient times there had been many revolutions . . . What makes America's founding extraordinary, observed the 30th president, is that it was the first to be based not on blood or soil but on a set of philosophical ideas about the nature of mankind and therefore of government. Other nations have their deepest roots in ethnicity, tribal loyalty, or military conquest. America, uniquely, was dedicated to a proposition - to the fundamental, self-evident truth that all men are created equal and the political ideas that flow from that truth. . . .

Jeff Goldstein has some thoughts on the Constitution today, apparently prompted by a very interesting note from Dr. Larry Arn:

The 4th of July cover article of Time magazine claims that the Constitution is irrelevant.

Frightening. . . .

The Constitution does not allow us to do whatever we want to do. In the words of James Madison, the Constitution was framed out of the belief that “it is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”

The genius of the Constitution lies in its having a definite meaning on the fundamentals – that every individual has rights, that the people are sovereign, and that the governmental powers must remain separated – while leaving wide latitude to local government, or the people themselves, on issues not specifically addressed in the Constitution. . . .

Liberty. Equality. Self-government.

If the Fourth of July is a celebration of these things, it is a celebration of the Constitution as much as the Declaration of Independence. No constitution in history has proven itself more deeply committed to these principles, and no nation has been more richly blessed in return.

The basic truth within the Constitution is that the government cannot have limitless power, for the simple reason that government is made up of people. A Constitution with no definite meaning gives free reign to the passions of those people within and without the government. A Constitution with a meaning honored and obeyed becomes a guardian of all people, for it sustains a government that is strong within its defined powers but limited in order to protect the liberty and equality of citizens.Instead of scoffing at those Americans concerned that their federal government has overrun its limits in the name of energy and modernity, perhaps Time should consider what an American President said about the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution on the 150th anniversary of July 4th, 1776:

"It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."

- Calvin Coolidge
July 5, 1926

Read the whole thing. Follow the link to President Coolidge's full speech.  And Goldstein discusses in another post some philosophies which threaten our independence from government tyranny. For example:

The loss of a controlling idea about how interpretation works — how it comes to count as interpretation in the first place — has led us down the path where meaning is determined not by a true appeal to the foundational documents intended to constrain the power of a centralized authority, but rather by a judicial oligarchy, where one vote, determined by nothing more than partisan ideology, a felicity with signifiers, and a supposed unshakable fidelity to prior rulings, takes the place of our Constitution and Declaration as the law of the land for 300 million + people. . . .

We shan’t go down without a fight. Once this country is unrecognizable as this country, the time will come once again to declare our independence. . . .

Or, maybe we could start now to educate children once again about how our country began. There are even some resources available for TV. Remarkably, the token conservative in this round-table, George Will, is allowed to finish his thoughts. He did a good job of defending the Constitution.