There’s a debate going on in this country that is far wider than health care. Health care is the current battle; but the war is over the size, scope, and power of government over our lives.
Years prior to World War II, in 1931, Pope Pius XI denounced Benito Mussolini’s socialism as “Statolatry,” the idolatry of a worship of and dependence upon the state rather than God. And less than a decade later it would be socialism – both fascist and Marxist – which would bring hell on earth rather than the utopias the socialists had so falsely promised. Today, the American left wants more government, and then more, and ever more. Government as God, the State as Savior, meeting every need and demanding that it be the sole arbiter for determining what is right and what is wrong. And the American people are increasingly being compelled to abandon the free market system in exchange for one featuring increasing government control over every sphere of our lives.
The first of our two articles, from the Los Angeles Times, suggests that the vision of the founding fathers, particularly in the ideas of Thomas Jefferson for a small, limited federal government, should be cast aside as outmoded and anachronistic.
By Joseph J. Ellis, August 9, 2009
From the very beginning of our national history, Americans have been arguing about the proper role of government. Put succinctly, the dispute is between those who regard government as “them” and those who see it as “us.”
Our two founding documents embody the tension in its classical form. The Declaration of Independence locates sovereignty in the individual citizen, who possesses the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson so lyrically put it, and the power of government is described as an alien force that must be put on the permanent defensive. The Constitution enshrines “the people” as the sovereign agent, with a Bill of Rights that defines a protected region where government cannot intrude, but otherwise identifies a collective interest best managed by a federal government empowered to make decisions for the society as a whole.
All of United States political history can be understood as a perpetual debate between these two competing perspectives, symbolized at the start in the clash between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. The Jeffersonian position, with its emphasis on a minimalist government, prevailed throughout the 19th century and imprinted itself on the DNA of American culture as a quasi-sacred political creed.
By the start of the 20th century, as the United States became a more densely populated, ethnically diverse society, with an industrial economy dominated by large corporations, the Jeffersonian perspective grew increasingly anachronistic. It became abundantly clear that government power was necessary to regulate the swoonish swings of the marketplace, provide a safety net for poor and elderly citizens and protect the environment. Thus the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency.
But despite these projections of the Hamiltonian ethos, which presumes that there is a collective public interest that only government can serve, the Jeffersonian ethos remains a potent force, and not just in the right wing of the Republican Party. It colors the conversation about all the major domestic problems facing the Obama administration in ways that stigmatize as socialistic what we might ironically describe as the self-evident solutions.
In the healthcare debate, for example, there is a national consensus that we have a broken and bloated system. But instead of replacing it with the kind of single-payer government-run system adopted by most of the developed countries on the planet, that option is ruled out of order at the start of the debate. As a result, the best we can hope for is modest reform of an inherently flawed and expensive system. […]
It should be realized that Joseph Ellis is hardly the only liberal who thinks in terms of moving away from the government or the ideas of our founding fathers. Allow me to quote Barack Obama:
Obama: “I think that we can say that the Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and that the framers had that same blind spot.”
Obama talked about “the fundamental flaw of this country…”
Obama: “But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution…”
Hardly an affirmation of the wisdom of our founding fathers, who created the greatest system of government the world has ever seen.
I would submit, first of all, that Alexander Hamilton would be just as appalled at the gigantic colossus our government has become as would Jefferson. I would suggest that neither man, seeing the enormous and unresponsive federal bureaucracy, would view the gargantuan federal bureaucracy as “us.” They would see it as an alien power running amok over the people’s lives. They would see it as a far greater tyranny than the one imposed by the British king whom they had defeated.
To quote Mark Levin, from Liberty and Tyranny:
“The founders understood that the greatest threat to liberty is an all-powerful central government, where the few dictate to the many. They also knew that the rule of the mob would lead to anarchy and, in the end, despotism” (4).
They understood government as a necessary evil, rather than as a desired goal. In the words of James Madison, the most influential of the authors of the Constitution, in Federalist 51:
“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
And I would ask, what evidence is there that the federal government is in any way “controlling itself?”
First of all, we have growing by leaps and bounds what Alexis de Tocqueville described as a “soft tyranny“:
“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”
Secondly, the federal government has immersed itself – and the American people – into levels of debt that boggle the limits of human comprehension. We now have a national debt of well over $100 trillion, if we count (which we should) our “unfunded liabilities” such as the Social Security and the Medicare which Joseph Ellis so praises. And as for Barack Obama – the president whose policies Ellis is writing to defend:
“Mr. Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents — from George Washington to George W. Bush — combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.”
And that is before the huge costs of ObamaCare; it is before Cap-and-trade; it is before anything Obama wants to do for the remaining 3 1/2 years of his presidency. This is no government that is “controlling itself.” Anything but.
Incredibly, Ellis ends his article with this:
No less an American hero than George Washington put it rather defiantly in 1785: “We are either a united people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation. … If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending it.” And even Jefferson acknowledged that his anti-government vision would become irrelevant once we ceased being an agricultural society and that future generations — meaning us — would at some point need to throw off what he called “the dead hand of the past.”
Joseph Ellis doesn’t want us to think about what it was that Washington actually intended to provide us with “unity.” Rather, he wants to import his own meaning of “unity” as one being imposed via a massive octopus of federal power. But George Washington had a very different idea of national unity than does Ellis. In his Farewell Address – considered one of the most important political addresses in American history – George Washington said:
“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington, Farewell Address
Think of the implications of that statement. Our greatest founding father essentially said, ‘If you want your politics to prosper, the two things you will not separate will be religion and morality. If you want your government to work well, if you want American exceptionalism, if you want the government to do right, if you want all of the benefits and none of the curses of government, then you won’t separate religion and morality from political life.’ And America’s greatest patriot gave a litmus test for patriotism, arguing, ‘Anyone who would try to remove religion and morality from public life, I will not allow them to call themselves a patriot. Because they are trying to destroy the country.’
Think of George Washington when you contemplate that the liberal legal arm, the ACLU, is literally trying to put a high school principal and an athletic director for praying over a meal at an employees’ lunch.
So liberals do not want the limited government fought for and instituted by our founding fathers. The founding fathers – Alexander Hamilton included – simply do not permit the Statism that the modern American left want. What kind of government do they want in its place?
Now turn to the New York Times.
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: March 31, 2009Every so often, history serves up an analogy that’s uncomfortable, a little distracting and yet still very relevant.
In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.
More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.
The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.
No sane person enjoys mixing nuance and Nazis, but this bit of economic history has a particular importance this week. In the run-up to the G-20 meeting, European leaders have resisted calls for more government spending. Last week, the European Union president, Mirek Topolanek, echoed a line from AC/DC — whom he had just heard in concert — and described the Obama administration’s stimulus plan as “a road to hell.”
Here in the United States, many people are understandably wondering whether the $800 billion stimulus program will make much of a difference. They want to know: Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century.
Yes, stimulus works. […]
Incredibly, when you put the liberal Los Angeles Times together with the liberal New York Times, the message is: “Be a lot less like Thomas Jefferson, and a lot more like Adolf Hitler”.
David Leonhardt certainly did not want his readers to think of Barack Obama as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. He tried to provide all the necessary caveats. Nevertheless, this reminds us of a core truth of the Nazis that liberals generally don’t want you to think about; that the word ‘Nazi’ is an acronym for the “National Socialist German Workers Party.” And the fact that both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the National Socialist German Workers Party stand as grim reminders that socialism is ever an experiment that can go terribly, terribly wrong.
Socialism derives from a diametrically different philosophical and moral system than the profoundly Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment-oriented worldview from which our founding fathers established the United States of America. Gene Edward Veith describes this fundamental incompatibility/hostility in his great work, “Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview.” Linda Kimball addresses this dichotomy in shorter form in her article, “The Materialist Faith of Communism, Socialism, and Liberalism.” Then there is the profoundly powerful Harvard address given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn entitled “A World Split Apart.”
Jonah Goldberg addresses how this massive demarcation between the intellectual traditions of the American right and left continues to this very day:
“No top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger. All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism. Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” (Liberal Fascism, 175-6).
American intellectuals might indignantly snort, “I’m not a fascist; I’m a neo-Marxist!” But regardless, they share the same underlying moral, philosophical, and economic assumptions. And either way, they are still socialists. To quote Richard Pipes, both “Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism.”
Joe the Plumber heard Barack Obama talk about “spreading the wealth around” and responded, “That sounds like socialism.” The mainstream media went ballistic in its denial that Barack Obama had anything whatsoever to do with socialism. And then he won, and the liberal publication Newseek proudly trumpeted on it’s February 16th cover, “WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW.”
The “kind of single-payer government-run system adopted by most of the developed countries on the planet” LA Times writer Joseph Ellis describes is simply “socialized medicine” by another name. Ellis complains about conversations that “stigmatize as socialistic”; the problem with that characterization is that they ARE socialistic.
There’s been this movement by the elitists among us to be more like sophisticated Europe dating all the way back to our founding. Some say today, “What Europeans do with government is pretty good. And what they do with civil rights is pretty good. And what they do with health care is pretty good.” And there’s this move to be more like Europe. In our Supreme Court liberal justices routinely cite what Europe does in their law in order to replace what we do in ours. Thomas Jefferson made a statement against the “Let’s be like Europe” that is every bit as valid today as it was the day he made it:
“The comparisons of our government with those of Europe are like a comparison of heaven and hell.” — Thomas Jefferson
Whether health care, cap-and-trade, or anything else our modern Europe-envying elitists want to do, it falls in the face of the fact that America has dwarfed Europe in economic output, productivity, and wealth. We’re constantly told that we need to be more like Europe and offer socialized medicine in order to be more “competitive.” If that is so, than why is it Europe – which has socialized medicine – that has long struggled to be competitive?
In the health care debate Ronald Reagan had a warning for us. Way back in 1961 he said:
“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”
It was a speech that could have easily popped out of a time capsule labeled, “Open in event of future threat from socialized medicine.”
Mark Levin said:
“The Statist veils his pursuits in moral indignation, intoning in high dudgeon the injustices and inequities of liberty and life itself, for which only he can provide justice and bring a righteous resolution. And when the resolution proves elusive, as it undoubtedly does – whether the Marxist promise of “the workers’ paradise” or the Great Society’s “war on poverty” – the Statist demands ever more authority to wring out the imperfections of mankind’s existence. Unconstrained by constitutional prohibitions, what is left to limit the Statist’s ambitions but his own moral compass, which has already led him astray! He is never circumspect about his own shortcomings. Failure is not a product of his beliefs but merely want of power and resources. Thus are born endless rationalizations for seizing ever more governmental authority” (Liberty and Tyranny, 10).
It is time to end the advance of the good-intentioned-paved road to hell. We have a government that is spending too much, taxing too much, and intruding too much into the lives of Americans. It is time to be a lot less like Hitler and the socialists and a lot more like the founding fathers and the recognition of the fixed and non-violable constitutional limits they created.
Tags: Alexander Hamilton, blind spot, Constitution, control itself, debt, Declaration of Independence, founding fathers, George Washington, Hitler, limited government, Nazis, Reagan, regulations, socialism, socialist, spending, stalolatry, statism, stimulus, Thomas Jefferson, unity
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