I’m not watching the Democratic National Convention. I know what those people think and I don’t need to hear it again.
But reports from those who are watching are frightening.
Fellow SLOB Beers with Demo:
We’re proud of the Democratic Party. We really are. Instead of shying away from or backing down from their “You Didn’t Build That” rhetoric and underpinning philosophy, they are doubling, nay, tripling down on their full-service, 24/7 statism.
Check out the following ad from the DNC: [link]
“The Government is the only thing we all belong to”
This is news to us. With respect to that quote above, there’s wrong and then there is wrong on a scale of enormity that it almost defies description. This fits the latter.
[...]
No. We don’t belong to the government. You don’t belong to the government. We are individual citizens of this country. We belong to this country.
Conflating government with country is precisely in keeping with this dangerous statist philosophy that your individual rights as a citizen flow not from the Creator or natural law as codified by the Constitution rather the government.
Amen. And see Ann Althouse’s take:
7:19: The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Congress, Charles Gonzales, uses the motto “e pluribus unum” — out of many, one — to mean that all the people become one, instead of the idea that the states were brought together into one nation. The idea that the people merged into a single entity — that sounds like fascism to me. Oddly, as it repurposes the old motto, it expresses the old fashioned idea of the melting pot.
[...]
7:42: Nancy Pelosi is introduced along with all the Democratic women of the House. There’s disco music playing. The hell? Then I detect that it’s “I’m Every Woman.” Again with this creepy merging of individuals into the whole.
Extinguishment of the individual and submission to the collective. Orwell and Huxley were right.
It’s not the Muslims who hate us because of our freedom. It’s the Democrats.
Another way of looking at this is that the citizens of the United States are collectively responsible for the governance of the Nation.
“Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people”
- Abraham Lincoln
And by “this”, I mean the original quote: “The Government is the only thing we all belong to”
Also, in response to, ” The idea that the people merged into a single entity — that sounds like fascism to me,” I would refer back to the Preamble of the Constitution which states:
We the People not the individual States.
The People.
The citizenry.
The citizens of The United States of America of which all Americans are a part of.
Quite a leap. But, to defend the Democratas at this point, you have to make quite a leap. Realitly be damned. You make me more and more proud to be a libertarian.
Again, this strange influence that I seem to have over your state of mind is really quite disconcerting.
Your emotions and actions are your own. I have nothing to do with them.
The entire U.S. Constitution can be summed up very simply as, “We all be lone wolves…fend for yourselves or perish.” It was, even at that time, called, “The lone wolf manifesto.”
Those are STILL the most pro-human sentiments ever assembled.
The entire Bill of Rights eviscerated government powers and limited any and all governmental action.
A Corporate entity is a legitimate “We,” there are few other endeavors where our disparate interests coincide.
IF you and I invest in the same mechanism, I might, as a fellow investor, (begrudgingly) accept your doing well, as the price of that investment, but any savvy investor knows – today’s “friend,” is more often than not, tomorrow’s “enemy.”
In the centuries since Jefferson penned his lone wolf doctrine – individualism uber alles….there has been nothing better to come along, in fact throughout the 20th Century you would be right in noting that “Lesser men have actually screwed up a near perfect document,” – fend for yourself.
.
.
.
.
“….the citizens of the United States are collectively responsible for the governance of the Nation,”
THAT’S a rather in-artful summation of what Romney and the Republicans said – “We (the people) own government, not the reverse,” OR “The government belongs to US, not WE to it.”
The problems with the Democratic version are all too obvious (we certainly DO NOT “belong to” government), however, the problem with the stated GOP version is that it STILL violates the individualism/limited government template our Founders bequeathed us. It’s NOT OK for the few to be robbed in order to help the many, “so long as it’s voted in by a majority.”
Theft/redistribution, etc. is still an abomination even when (perhaps ESPECIALLY when) it’s voted in by a “majority.”
As Ben Franklin famously said, “Democracy is four wolves and a sheep deciding on what’s for dinner.”
Not to split hairs but it appears that your Franklin quote did not come from him much as it sounds like something he would have said. See http://www.freakonomics.com/2010/08/12/quotes-uncovered-if-wolves-and-sheep-could-vote/ for a brief discussion by a fairly reputable source or for a longer discussion by a source with which I am not all that familiar.
All of that begs the question of whether ours is a democracy or a representative republic. Given the multiple protections against majority domination, I tend to think the latter. However, those protections are continually being chipped away by both parties so we may yet become a democracy.
I’ve also heard it attributed to Ambrose Bierce, who also wrote my favorite short story (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge), regardless, it’s a very apt adage.
Certainly America’s Founders were all familiar with the inherent corruptions of democracies, as Edward Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776!
They did everything they could to thwart the abuses of democracy at every turn, from the institution of the Electoral College to the indirect election of Senators.
Senators weren’t directly elected until the 17th Amendment was passed at the end of May, 1913, the same year the 16th Amendment and the Federal Reserve Act were passed.
One COULD mark 1913 as the the year that 20th Century “Lesser lights” embarked on screwing up a system that had given the world its greatest experiment in human freedom AND the greatest amount of prosperity for the greatest number for over a century at that point.
There remains a lot of misunderstandings about exactly what the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve is.
It is NOT an actual “federal agency. In fact, the Federal Reserve recently openly admitted that it’s privately owned. When it was defending itself against a Bloomberg News request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Reserve stated unequivocally in court that it was “not an agency” of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
It’s been noted that foreign governments and foreign banks do own significant ownership interests in the member banks that own the Federal Reserve system. So it would be accurate to say that the Federal Reserve is partially foreign-owned.
According to the Business Insider (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-09/wall_street/31040431_1_interest-rates-big-banks-member-banks), “According to the results of a limited Fed audit mentioned, a total of $16.1 trillion in secret loans were made by the Federal Reserve between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010.
The following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from that audit report (page 131)
Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion
We’ve come a very loooooong way from the Founder’s original intent.
As usual, the dispute over this phrase arises from imprecise use of language. One can “belong to” a garden club, but not in the sense that Sojourner Truth “belonged to” her master. Mr. Wired phrased it better when he said that we all have the right to choose our government, but most of us have no say in who runs the global corporations.