Posted on 05/18/2013 12:13:34 AM PDT by neverdem
Speaking at Ohio State University earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity. Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so youd think hed at least get a bit of a...
--snip--
The president and the IRS commissioner are unable to name any individual who took the decision to target only conservative groups. It just kinda sorta happened, and, once it had, it growed like Topsy. But the lady who headed that office, Sarah Hall Ingram, is now in charge of the IRS office for Obamacare. Many countries around the world have introduced government health systems since 1945, but, as I wrote here last year, only in America does health care reform begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine. So now not only are your books and Facebook posts legitimate tax issues but so is your hernia, and your prostate, and your erectile dysfunction. Next time round, the IRS will be able to leak your incontinence pads to George Soros.
Big Government is erecting a panopticon state one that sees everything, and regulates everything. Its great customer service, except that you can never get out of the store.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Ping
All you got to do is keep your nose clean and you will be OK. This is for the good of the public, so don’t worry. The government has your back.(front and sides, too.)
What a great line, concluding a terrific article.
Palin was right. Cruz was right. Beck was right. Rush was right. They have now (unfortunately for the libs) been vindicated like it or not.
The premise in the title of “autocrat accountants” is not accurate. The accountants are not the problem. The problem is the politicians. The problem is Obama and his inner circle.
With due respect, your are partially wrong. What Steyn recognizes is that the erection of an autrocratic bureaucracy allows the liberal dream state to move on, regardless of what the politicians are doing and regardless of who they are. This is how totalitarians get away with it - they hide behind the bureau. And the bureau, well, they are just “following orders” or “regulations” etc.
The second more scary point is that all these accountants and other government employees are willing to do the dirty work for the Obama Administration.
The only solution is to clean house. The only way to stop this from continuing is to send the employees who abuse their power to prison. Among employees who abuse their power I include Obama.
One of the major defensive refrains of the Clinton administration, no matter what the accusation of governmental abuse, was ‘they are career officials.’ Meaning, they are not political!
The Clintons got away with it, and it has just given every single lib-left govt employee ‘permission’ to ‘help’ the country to get on the right track. Pardon me for using the word “right” in this sense. There is no substitute.
The "Panopticon" was a prison so hideous that it has never actually been built in all its "glory".
It was the brainchild of Jeremy Bentham, that heartless Utilitarian philosopher. The Panopticon
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. "
They actually built one in Lima, Peru in the middle of the 1800s. It has sense been torn down. You can see what i looked like here:
http://historiadordelperu.blogspot.com/2012/02/la-vida-en-la-penitenciaria-de-lima.html
It’s always “a few rogue agents.”
Dear Leader never knew!
Pretty handy, huh?
The horror of the true Panopticon is that the cells have no doors, just metal fences, and they all face into the center where the guard tower is located. The prisoners are under direct observation at all times, and never know when they are being observed.
The closest to a "true" Panopticon may be the old Joliet prison in Illinois:
It still had doors, though, so you could sit down with your back against the door and not be visible.
Same thing happened in the Jim Crow South... blacks had to pass difficult test to get the right to vote - whites just signed a card. Sounds like our modern IRS agents...
Different victims - same evil...
Perhaps if Obama watched Fox news he would learn about these pesky problems even sooner.
DEMOCRATS!
You’re right. It was democrats who invented both evils... Good catch.
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