At Least Small Communities Are Human
By Jeremy Beer for FRONT PORCH REPUBLIChttp://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/09/at-least-small-communities-are-human/
That’s the point made darn well by Stefan McDaniel as part of his response to globalization defenders (the link will take you back to the whole debate). A while back, McDaniel also wrote a perceptive brief review of our Kauffman’s biography of Luther Martin. I hereby invite McDaniel up to this here porch to pass the jug around a while. And bring them other Plumb Lines dudes along with ya.
Comments
Casey Khan
In trying to determine how America, which started as a bastion of limited government, has ended up in the current economic and military nightmares we confront today. Is it the military industrial complex? Political capitalism? Is it too much regulation? Public ed? Etc.
But now I’m thinking to myself, it’s the Constitution stupid!
Conservatives and libertarians often like to find comfort in looking to the apparent limits of the constitution. However, even if the constitution were followed tomorrow, limiting the federal government to the enumerated powers, we’d still have this nightmare on our hands, because these powers, while enumerated, are substantial engines that atomize the human person and tear down localities. And in the process of leveling civil society for the sake of a “more perfect union” (read leviathan), Patrick Henry argues, the constitution gives its practitioners unaccountable authority, regardless of “maladministration” their actions have upon the common good.
D.W. Sabin
Blaming the current farrago upon the Constitution will do …of course we can blame it on any written document. In the end, it is simply men, and now woman who take it upon themselves to advance the interests of their fellows by sallying forth into a government that quickly subsumes them in the “practical realities” of governance in a “complex world”. Some of these men and woman have the best of intentions and some of them are the standard fare floor-flushers and sycophants that have infested government for millennia. The mix sloshes back and forth in degrees but the bottom line is that when a politician…our so called “leaders” suggest that they want to help you, they are really informing you that they want to help themselves to your pockets because obviously, the citizenry cannot be trusted to conduct themselves with a spirit of community and so needs a large, consumptive and well-armed machine to establish, with an iron hand, what the meaning of charity is.
The Constitution did not cause the current pismire, a functionally illiterate, historicidal, acquiescent, disinterested and tame-if-fed citizenry submitted themselves to it. With submission comes tyranny and it will no doubt come on the heels of a Constitutional Convention hailed as a great need to overcome the “current realities” an “outdated” Constitution fails to address “appropriately”.
In other words, the language has been corrupted with the eras relativistic feel-goodisms and is now ready to do the heavy lifting of those who will use the rhetoric of “freedom” to advance a system where liberty is dissected, flayed and put on exhibit for all to admire like some form of Natural History Exhibit. The spectator waits impatiently. Notions of “National Greatness” will no doubt make a spectacle of it all.
Casey Khan
“The Constitution did not cause the current pismire, a functionally illiterate, historicidal, acquiescent, disinterested and tame-if-fed citizenry submitted themselves to it. With submission comes tyranny and it will no doubt come on the heels of a Constitutional Convention hailed as a great need to overcome the “current realities” an “outdated” Constitution fails to address “appropriately”.”
True, true, it is us people who are culpable. Nevertheless, at some point, doesn’t the law, in this case the Constitution, have some sort of sociological effect on making us “acquiescent, disinterested and tame-if-fed citizenry?