The failure of Obama’s initial steps in fundamentally transforming America has brought on accusations that our government is broken and ungovernable… but this is silly. The only thing that has failed is Democrat overreach.
Democrats failure is actually evidence of the system working exactly as it is supposed to. The founding fathers attempted to construct a system that would thwart tyranny with checks and balances. If they had wanted to create a socialist paradise I suppose they would have done so.
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. ~Alexis de Tocqueville
Civil Society
Civil Society is a term used to describe the interactions of free citizens. The collective action of free citizens acting outside of government for the betterment and enrichment of fellow citizens and society. De Tocqueville had it right when he said that, “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.” This is democracy: power in the hands of people.
Unfortunately, progressives and liberals have an agenda that seeks to effectively crowd out all interactions that are outside of government. For the life of me I don’t understand why. Government is no different from any other large ‘corporate’ entity. The only thing I can think of is that it is the religion of Marxism which permeates progressive ideology. For the left, voluntary grassroots uprisings are illegitimate unless their ultimate purpose is to unite in collective action through government or to empower government. All else is heresy.
So when the issue of which nations of the world are more charitable the left can only reference how much governments spend. Ignoring the private donations of individual citizens. The definition of charity, of how much one cares about the poor and the sick, can only be accounted for by how much you want government to spend on the problem. This is why conservatives are called heartless and evil by liberals. Why they are accused of wanting to starve children and old people. Of wanting the sick to die… because they oppose government taking over healthcare.
Representative Republic
Democracy is rule by the people. As opposed to rule by a privileged few. Our founding fathers realized that direct democracy was not a stable form of government, but they also viewed a privileged ruling class akin to royalty as an abomination to human liberty. So they tempered pure democracy and created the United States as a representative republic able to retain the rights of the people to rule themselves and still have characteristics of conservative stability.
The problem Democrats and liberals are having is not new. Friedrich A. Hayek describes how progressive economic planning always devolves into the need to force people to comply with the plan.
Planning and Power
IN ORDER to achieve their ends, the planners must create power—power over men wielded by other men—of a magnitude never before known. Their success will depend on the extent to which they achieve such power. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires. Hence arises the clash between planning- and democracy.
Many socialists have the tragic illusion that by depriving private individuals of the power they possess in an individualist system, and transferring this power to society, they thereby extinguish power. ~jim.com/hayek.htm
When Lincoln spoke of, “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” he was not endorsing a dictatorship of the proletariat. He was expressing the political idea that the government is the people. That the power of government resides in every citizen. That it should be citizens exercising power over the state not the other way around.
In contrast, the government of Obama sees Americans as subjects to be taken care of and this requires the state to take upon itself more and more power and responsibility that should rightly be left in the hands of individual citizens.
“It’s not that I want to punish your success,” Obama told him. “I want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success, too.
Then, Obama explained his trickle-up theory of economics.
“My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” ~nypost.com
A government that cannot yet enact this kind of sweeping control over entire sectors of the economy and override the decision making rights of millions is not broken. The fact that we are still debating whether or not to socialize healthcare is a sign that something is broken: the commmon sense of way too many politicians.
