Angelo M. Codevilla's article about America's ruling class offers insight into many of the country's ills and why solving problems at the national level is so difficult. The current ruling class elites are resolute enemies of liberty. That is, if liberty is the extent to which the lives of individuals are free from government interference.
The Corruptocrat's totalitarian mommy state is the enemy of liberty because, through it, they hope to establish complete control of virtually every aspect of life by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. From Julius Seizure Genachowski's attempts to muzzle free speech on the Internet, to O-bumaCare's edict that all Americans must buy health insurance, to the Environmental Protection Agency's carbon propaganda intended to make our light bills skyrocket, there are regulations that control and manipulate nearly every aspect of Americans' lives.
Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.
By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency's value for all.
In his article “How to short circuit the ruling class,” author Wes Vernon poses an interesting question. He wonders, [m]aybe we should have the right to elect (or defeat) the faceless bureaucrats who presume the right to dominate our lives. Why not? After all, these people have anointed themselves with the power to create legislation arbitrarily, not merely taboos, or thou-shalt-nots that prohibit actions, but totems, or must-do orders that force kow towing to their supreme authority.
They are the segment of our population that presumes to set the limits of what Americans should be told, what issues are to be discussed (and which ones are to be ignored), the cultural tenor of the nation, what we can eat, what we can hear, what we can wear, what we can drive, and — what we can say.
This is why voters should have the right to vote them into and out of office. Vernon offers a concise version of Dr. Codevilla’s message, he states, Basically, here's what the professor would say to the arrogant, faceless bureaucrats with ipso facto quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers as to how the rest of us are to live our lives: Let the voters decide whether you get to keep your job.
Bureaucrats are the hammer that fashions progressives’ totalitarian state. In Investor’s Business Daily, an article titled “Obama’s ‘Progressive’ Failures” quotes the president bragging that he had enacted the most progressive legislative agenda in decades. The article continues by describing the progressive philosophy such that it stresses the importance of centralized government control over Americans' lives as paramount. It actively seeks to diminish the constitutional limits on what government can — and can't — do.
It further exposes progressive totalitarianism by revealing that its [a]dherents understood that the idea of limited government based on individualism, natural rights and property rights — as defined by the Founding Fathers — had to be discredited.
It stood in the way of their social engineering agenda, which views patriotism as a danger, religion as a vice and constitutionalism as a mere historical tic to be eradicated.
In short, progressivism is a creed of Big Government — government with few checks and balances; government not of the people, by the people and for the people, but government of, by and for the special interests and elites that form the movement's backbone.
Senator Rand Paul has a plan to save taxpayers one-half a trillion dollars and significantly reduce the federal government’s footprint. This article is required reading for lovers of liberty everywhere.
The elections in November, 2010, showed clearly that Americans want a live-and-let-live world in which liberty and free expression are championed and cherished. We are chafing under the oppressive yoke imposed on us by The One and the other socialist-progressive ruling class elites. It is time for the governed to seize the reins of government once again. Remember the words of Barry Goldwater. I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!
May your gods be with you.
