Exposed Like Never Before

Bernard Goldberg, author of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America and Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right, has written an article over at AOL News entitled Juan Williams, NPR and the Death of Liberalism.  Mr. Goldberg says:

What makes this so crazy -- and so sad -- is that liberals are the open-minded ones, the ones who cherish the free exchange of ideas, the smart ones. And if you don't believe me, just ask any liberal, who will be glad to tell you how smart and open-minded he or she is. But these are the kind of people who believe in "free speech" only as long as they agree with you.

But I feel worse for American liberals. Because what we have here is one more piece of evidence that too many of them have forgotten how to be liberal.

Only about 20 percent of Americans identify themselves as liberals. Liberalism was once a great American movement. It led the fight for civil rights, the most important issue, as far as I'm concerned, of the 20th century.

I have made this distinction in blog posts and other writings before; there is a difference between Classical Liberalism (our Founders' philosophy and the philosophy which came out of the Enlightenment) and Modern Liberalism / Progressives which is Leftist collectivism. Classical liberalism is defined as a free-society under a free-economy (i.e. laissez-fair capitalism--something we haven't had in this country for ages with the exception, perhaps, of the first 150 years or so). 

There can be no such thing as a free-society if there is no free economy (laissez-faire capitalism) to go along with it. They are, by necessity, dependent on each other.

I have some hard news for the people of America; economic conservatism is the most important element and here's why:  we cannot argue and debate about the luxury issues such as abortion, gay marriage, etc if we are living under economic collectivism.  If, as a society, we decide we would like to live under the conditions modern day Cubans are living under--then abortion and gay marriage are going to be the least of our concerns.

We now live under a mixed-collectivist economy--and it is getting worse and worse as the decades roll on; freedom cannot survive like this.  America and its ideas cannot survive like this.  It is difficult for people in this country to imagine that we have been harboring internal enemies.  In general, we do not like the idea of opposing anybody's right to say anything they wish; that is the whole purpose of the First Amendment.  However, there are people who don't like the idea of freedom.  There are people present in this country who think this way.  That is fine--but, they don't want to have an open debate about their collectivist ideas because they know most Americans would reject them soundly if they are brought into the daylight.  The bureaucracies, the Fed, the schools, Hollywood, the press--all have been subjugated to Leftist / Progressive / Collectivist creeping tyranny to poison the minds of the public and the youth for the purposes of making them more malleable to eventual economic, collectivist enslavement.

If there needs to be a "death" of anything--it needs to be the death of collectivism (Cuba, the former Soviet Union, the theocratic tyrannies of the Middle East) and Progressivism.  Collectivism / Progressivism are the illnesses which have infected the entire Democrat Party and to a lesser degree various members of the elected Republican Party.

All of our public programs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all require the theft of one person to redistribute to someone else.  Public programs are the same things as the larger collectivist tyrannical ideologies that fostered them.  Whenever you discuss a government promoting public programs--you are discussing collectivism.  Just because it is on a small scale makes it no less immoral.  These programs are all insolvent and bankrupt because unaccountable politicians have been robbing the treasury and robbing the funds to pay out favors to their electorates to keep them in power.  This reality about politicians is why public programs and collectivism, in the end, always destroy a society.

Voluntary charity is the only valid aid a free society can provide for help to those who truly need it. 

Once any society starts compromising with collectivism in any form it opens the door for the slow creep of tyranny into that society; that is exactly what has been happening in our nation ever since the time of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Ayn Rand once wrote:

‎Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others--the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better.

This is philosophically very important.  Our Constitution and our form of government were devised to protect the individual over the collective.  There is no such thing as "the good of society."  The term "society" is, what is called in philosophy, a floating abstraction--it simply is a word that describes a collection of individuals who choose to live together under the same political contract; there is no such thing as a collective brain--it is why tyrannies fail and collapse; "society" as a concrete concept means nothing.  Free, individual men cannot be bound together collectively as cattle.  That is a harsh, philosophical reality that the collectivist Left refuses to recognize for whatever reason;  whether it is ignorance or deliberate obfuscation for the accumulation of political power makes little difference.

If there are liberals or Democrats out there who want to truly help the downtrodden of society, if their desperation to help those in need truly comes from compassion rather than the need to acquire political power or somehow satiate a desperate desire to prove that collectivism really can work, then they need to ask corporations, businesses, and individual people to voluntarily donate some of their time and money to doing so.  Anything else is a breeding ground for a continued creep towards tyranny. 

Collectivism is evil because it robs the individual of his right to exist for his own sake.  The man who votes deliberately to steal the bread out of his neighbors mouth through the unconstitutional process of Progressive taxation or to provide health care for one (the patient) at the expense of another (the doctor) is morally no better than the man who hires a hit man to do his killing for him.