Why not push it to the max and give out free *everything* and everyone gets to work for the State? Really that is what the ‘progressives’ have wanted for decades, and converting individual liberty into State oversight and mandate is the final reductio ad absurdum: you want it free, then the State owns everything and is the source of everthing. That, as the USSR found, did not make everyone equally rich but equally poor, with hospitals and clinics without electricity, running water, sewage facilities and, often, doctors.
Government was not created amongst men to do good, but contain the nastiest impulses of individual and society so that the overall society could not be harmed by such things. Of course in the months before the Declaration this was clearly stated by another of those Revolutionaries:
“Some writers have so confounded society with government,
as to leave little or no distinction between them;
whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness;
the former promotes our POSITIVELY by uniting our affections,
the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one
encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.
The first a patron, the last a punisher.”
One of the most cited, least read works around today called Common Sense by Tom Paine. We are now at the end course where our political class knows no difference between government and society and the political parties thrive on creating distinctions to better capture the heart of government. And lose society as part of the bargain.
Both sides do it with the best of intentions! The D party does it for the ‘poor’ and ‘minorities’ and seeks to further divide the people based on those things and have government ‘do good’ by them… forgetting that it is society that does the making of what is good through the work of its dedicated citizens and their investment into charity. The R party is just as bad seeking to restrict civil liberties in the name of ‘the children’ or ‘clean up the political process’. That is how we get one party coming in to take away money and liberty to waste via government, the least capable of institutions and least efficient of them, to make things ‘free’ for everyone… while the other seeks to liberty and freedoms of speech and leverage punishment for minor vices that are the sole purview of the individual, thus creating a societal poverty of intellectual discourse and fear for having done anything wrong in having transgressed any law or rule about such things.
Imagine government mandated health care that works as well as the department of energy, is as friendly as the IRS and is as punishing as the justice department. Plus it now has its hand in determining what you can and cannot choose and may even decide to start having bureaucrats decide what care is best for you. Of course you will not hear that from either party as the ‘good’ of health care outweighs the evil of having government know your health details intimately and having punishing power over you if you do not do as it says.
Being up front about that would spark a revolution… or bring about a totalitarians state. That is why neither party tells you what these ‘good things’ will really cost you, until it is far too late to protest.
