Wehrwolfen
Senior Member
- May 22, 2012
- 2,750
- 340
- 48
By Glenn Fairman
March 16, 2013
It was not long ago that the zeitgeist of America was the Horatio Alger story, a patchwork of tales serving as the reigning motivational compass pointing towards individual success. It was the time of the Bootstrap Ethic: the notion that a man was limited only by his own zeal and perseverance in service to his lofty goal. How many magnificent ideas were mulled over and refined while cleaning offices or flipping hamburgers? How countless are the fledgling businesses that found their genesis in a garage or kitchen; and by virtue of investing the hard-won nest egg, these gamblers wagered all for the sake of a far-off vision? How many industrious hands have spun straw into gold?
It is in light of this individualist ethic that the current administration stands in diametrical juxtaposition to the American Dream. To be sure, the Democratic Party has made common cause with the fundamental premises of a foreign statist ideology that somehow the savory fruit of the private sector's accumulated risks and exertions are the moral property of the system that suckled the Golden Goose. Viewed through this lens, the blood, sweat, and tears of individual success are only a self-interested mirage by which a lucky draw of the cards made one a winner in a zero-sum game. Government, which built the roads and bridges that facilitated your financial bankroll, therefore, reserves a significant claim on your winnings: to a tune far exceeding the paltry sum that you have begrudgingly allotted your patient Masters. And as we speak, that pound of flesh is accruing interest and rapidly metastasizing into a dark Socialist reality.
But the conservative spirit begs to differ. The template of America's Dream is perhaps more owing to our own unique understanding underlying the philosophic relations between the City and Man. The construction of Negative Liberty -- that we might do that which is not forbidden by law, stands in contradistinction to the collectivist idea that what we may do must be sanctioned with permission by the regime: which is the sole arbiter of private action by virtue of authority. The American experiment, with its original laissez-faire firewall separating the public and private spheres of life, had been to entrepreneurship what gasoline is to fire. It unleashed self-interest in a way that optimized human excellence and efficiency and allowed the resulting public coffers to be filled and in turn utilized for the common weal. Therefore, contrary to the Progressive's deconstructed narrative of political economy, it is the undirected genius of the private sphere which is primary for the Good Life. Free Markets providentially contributed the finances for government programs and institutions that have arisen only as a consequence of a second-order redistribution through moderate taxation and altruistic private largesse.
Of itself, government can do nothing, and the notion that somehow it is the proverbial tail that wags the dog is both philosophically and economically poisonous. The progressive analysis of the State's inordinate primacy has placed us suspended beneath the Socialist Gordian Knot while dangling over the Abyss of Insolvency. Those who would cast man in the collectivist mold would have us imbibe the weltanschauung of Hegel, which holds that humanity is the evolving construct of history and society in synthesis and that we possess no antecedent natures or morality. Viewed in this light, what we term as rights and duties proceed en utero from the emergence of the state. In America, the Founding Fathers claimed that we were endowed with natural rights and that the genius of our regime lay in distilling them from our thickly drawn ontologies that existed prior to government in an incalculably valuable essence. In the European model, our value is derived from our utility to the State and the collective. Thus, we are the children of such a collective and it is by necessity of the emergent regime that we obtain our identities.
As the mocking refrain: "You didn't build that" has travelled like lightning throughout the land as a testament to the people's realization that our overlords have lost touch with the Founders' vision, how quickly the progressives claim the bounty of an economic powerhouse they did not labor to build. One sees them salivating like vampires over their prey, whom they care for only as a parasite contemplates its host. The progressive construct, in service only to utopian abstraction, has no power of its own to create the wealth it requires to give flesh to its Egalitarian City. Therefore, it must, as a consequence, pander and buy off its political support through the redistributed wealth of others -- convincing the equation's recipients that they are powerless without their black hand of corruption. It is here that we fully understand what instruments government has built of its own necessity; and that what perhaps began its germination in altruism has matured through cynicism into a noxious choking weed of venal compulsion.
The liberal edifice has spared no expense in indoctrinating us to its catechism that the American Dream stands as a direct consequence of pro-active governmental economic manipulations. This is an unqualified lie.
Read more:
Articles: Human Excellence and Dependency: Who Built What?
March 16, 2013
It was not long ago that the zeitgeist of America was the Horatio Alger story, a patchwork of tales serving as the reigning motivational compass pointing towards individual success. It was the time of the Bootstrap Ethic: the notion that a man was limited only by his own zeal and perseverance in service to his lofty goal. How many magnificent ideas were mulled over and refined while cleaning offices or flipping hamburgers? How countless are the fledgling businesses that found their genesis in a garage or kitchen; and by virtue of investing the hard-won nest egg, these gamblers wagered all for the sake of a far-off vision? How many industrious hands have spun straw into gold?
It is in light of this individualist ethic that the current administration stands in diametrical juxtaposition to the American Dream. To be sure, the Democratic Party has made common cause with the fundamental premises of a foreign statist ideology that somehow the savory fruit of the private sector's accumulated risks and exertions are the moral property of the system that suckled the Golden Goose. Viewed through this lens, the blood, sweat, and tears of individual success are only a self-interested mirage by which a lucky draw of the cards made one a winner in a zero-sum game. Government, which built the roads and bridges that facilitated your financial bankroll, therefore, reserves a significant claim on your winnings: to a tune far exceeding the paltry sum that you have begrudgingly allotted your patient Masters. And as we speak, that pound of flesh is accruing interest and rapidly metastasizing into a dark Socialist reality.
But the conservative spirit begs to differ. The template of America's Dream is perhaps more owing to our own unique understanding underlying the philosophic relations between the City and Man. The construction of Negative Liberty -- that we might do that which is not forbidden by law, stands in contradistinction to the collectivist idea that what we may do must be sanctioned with permission by the regime: which is the sole arbiter of private action by virtue of authority. The American experiment, with its original laissez-faire firewall separating the public and private spheres of life, had been to entrepreneurship what gasoline is to fire. It unleashed self-interest in a way that optimized human excellence and efficiency and allowed the resulting public coffers to be filled and in turn utilized for the common weal. Therefore, contrary to the Progressive's deconstructed narrative of political economy, it is the undirected genius of the private sphere which is primary for the Good Life. Free Markets providentially contributed the finances for government programs and institutions that have arisen only as a consequence of a second-order redistribution through moderate taxation and altruistic private largesse.
Of itself, government can do nothing, and the notion that somehow it is the proverbial tail that wags the dog is both philosophically and economically poisonous. The progressive analysis of the State's inordinate primacy has placed us suspended beneath the Socialist Gordian Knot while dangling over the Abyss of Insolvency. Those who would cast man in the collectivist mold would have us imbibe the weltanschauung of Hegel, which holds that humanity is the evolving construct of history and society in synthesis and that we possess no antecedent natures or morality. Viewed in this light, what we term as rights and duties proceed en utero from the emergence of the state. In America, the Founding Fathers claimed that we were endowed with natural rights and that the genius of our regime lay in distilling them from our thickly drawn ontologies that existed prior to government in an incalculably valuable essence. In the European model, our value is derived from our utility to the State and the collective. Thus, we are the children of such a collective and it is by necessity of the emergent regime that we obtain our identities.
As the mocking refrain: "You didn't build that" has travelled like lightning throughout the land as a testament to the people's realization that our overlords have lost touch with the Founders' vision, how quickly the progressives claim the bounty of an economic powerhouse they did not labor to build. One sees them salivating like vampires over their prey, whom they care for only as a parasite contemplates its host. The progressive construct, in service only to utopian abstraction, has no power of its own to create the wealth it requires to give flesh to its Egalitarian City. Therefore, it must, as a consequence, pander and buy off its political support through the redistributed wealth of others -- convincing the equation's recipients that they are powerless without their black hand of corruption. It is here that we fully understand what instruments government has built of its own necessity; and that what perhaps began its germination in altruism has matured through cynicism into a noxious choking weed of venal compulsion.
The liberal edifice has spared no expense in indoctrinating us to its catechism that the American Dream stands as a direct consequence of pro-active governmental economic manipulations. This is an unqualified lie.
Read more:
Articles: Human Excellence and Dependency: Who Built What?
