Thursday, 20 January 2011

Rants

Whaddaya mean, “we”?


While digging under the rocks over at the CSM, Roberta uncovered an opinion piece by Dr. Anthony Schlaff attaking Republican opposition to Obamacare’s insurance mandate, and containing this lulu:

“...let us not forget that we as a society created our government to make our choices...”
Well, sorta, kinda, maybe.  I mean, government-by-strongman has always been about the rulers “making choices” for the ruled, expressed as “Do what I choose, or I’ll kill you.”  And representative government has always been about unloading the minutiae of administration from the backs of the populace.

But I don’t think that the founders woke up one morning saying, “It’s just what America needs: A government that will make our choices for us, so we don’t have to!”  I always thought that our government was more about backing up the individual citizen on the stuff that might be burdensome or difficult: “...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty,” and the like.  Nor do I believe that, once created, our government was supposed to go merrily on its way, with the citizens having no right to tell it, “Sorry, you got it wrong.”  (See: Election, 2010.)

Dr. Schlaff must live in a different society than I do.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 19:39:02 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 214 words, total size 2 kb.

<< Page 1 of 1 >>
66kb generated in CPU 0.01, elapsed 0.0854 seconds.
49 queries taking 0.0791 seconds, 158 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.