Posted on 08/19/2010 12:51:30 PM PDT by antiobamacare
Today’s Liberals, Progressives or admitted socialists are collectivists; any collectivist is necessarily totalitarian. Before considering the reasons, we should note that the earlier left was a stout defender of individual freedom along classical liberal lines shared with the Founders; collectivism began to replace that only with the rise of the Progressives into power after 1885.
Totalitarian: A form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed.
European collectivism proceeded via economic suffering into the Soviet Union, National Socialist (Nazi) Germany, National Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China to name the major cases. All were outright dictatorships in crude democratic guise. Some of the same ideas inform the current, non-democratic European Union albeit sans Storm Troopers.
The U.S. avoided the post World War I economic sufferings of Europe; American Progressives built on the difficulties accompanying the North American industrial revolution and following the Civil War. They wanted government to put their program in place; nothing else was powerful enough. Their first obvious success was the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act, which put government into the regulatory business, setting political supervision over the railroads. It also established the pattern that Progressives would follow thereafter, identifying needs and injustices they promised to cure with government power if elected…a pattern that necessarily extends government power over a perennially growing list of human activities.
The thesis is that all collectivists are totalitarians. A secondary thesis is that Progressives are collectivists. Both these classifications flow inarguably from the stated and demonstrated nature of their programs and from the fact that the programs always intend to impose desired behaviors by means of government power i.e. force, on people who may not agree.
(Excerpt) Read more at thewoodwardreport.com ...
Facism is all the rage in America now.
The reason is simple, they crave power to FORCE you to do the things THEY want you to do.
Slavery was a system where a person owned another person and had the right to receive all the benefits that the slave could produce and then determine what, if anything, the person who worked for received in return. Most of the time the food, housing, clothing, and medical care the slave received was the minimum required to maintain the health of the slave.
Socialism is precisely the same except that the slave owner is the government.
The difference is that in the old days, the slave owner probably knew the name of all his slaves and actually cared about them.
I feel like an outsider in my own country these days...
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That is not true. A slave was a substantial investment. You had to keep them in good health
There are books that talk about how some slaves cried at being fred, and wanted to stay and did stay on the plantations. And when they needed to be paid, then the fact that they were only able to live so good BECAUSE They all worked for free as slaves became apparent.
The owner lost their investment and now had to pay them, but with no money back from the freed property.
Slavery was bad and all that, and I am not for it by any means.
It was just THE WAY THINGS WERE back then. That was the system that had been in place for years.
People went to Africa to get slaves because that is where the slave market was.
The are true horror stories, but not all of them are horros stories.
That is not true. A slave was a substantial investment. You had to keep them in good health.
How is my statement not true? Read the whole thing. The houses that the slaves lived in were minimal. But often they weren't much worse than the poorest free men. And the clothing they got was equal to that of a very, very poor person. Well, they mostly had as much food as they could grow and raise. As for health, any good slave owner would raise hell if an overseer allowed a slave to die from an untended injury or illness or abuse.
Like I said, the difference between a socialism and old slavery is the old slave owners actually cared about their slaves.
Same as Sharia Law.
I think Hayek explained it better than any one in the Road to Serfdom.
These were the people that pushed to establish the national banking system, maritime laws that eliminated offshore shipping competition, the increased tariff system, and advocated federal financing of roads, canals, ports, and railroads.
Once these people gained power, the government was transformed to operationally serve the powerful, particularly in the Northeastern states.
When Lincoln came to power, and the secession served to totally disrupt the financial underpinning of their government, the “progressives” transferred their states’ financial resources and militias to Lincoln's control.
He then initiated a war to protect the “progressives” who now had formed a class of oligarchs that came to rule the country.
free will is an enemy of the state.
because James Taggert is blind. (atlas shrugged)
If we view the west's philosophic development in terms of essentials, three fateful turning points stand out; three major philosophers who above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of the past century and our current century.The three are Plato-Kant-Hegel.
The turning point for America was the massive importation of Kantian/Hegelian German philosophy to America in the period after the Civil War.The first consequence increasingly manifest in the postwar decades, was the proliferations of statist movements in America.The new statists included economists who adopted the "organic" collectivism of the German historical school,sociologists and historians who interpreted Darwin according to the social ideas of Hegel (the"reform" Darwinists), clergymen who interpreted Jesus according to the moral ideas of Kant (the Social Gospelers), single-taxers who followed Henry George, Utopians who followed Edward Bellamy, revolutionaries who followed Marx and Engels, "humanitarians" who followed Comte and the later John Stuart Mill, pragmatists who followed William James and the early John Dewey.
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