[stockpirate]

Facism is all the rage in America now.

[Blood of Tyrants]

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.

[Beowulf9]

I feel like an outsider in my own country these days...

[tutstar]

bump

[badgerlandjim]

bump

[FrankR]

Because what they want is so stupid, inane and evil the only way they can get people to participate is to force them in some way...and it will eventually come to physical force...

[w4women]

Same as Sharia Law.

[Truthsearcher]

I think Hayek explained it better than any one in the Road to Serfdom.

[hinckley buzzard]

The fundamental problem with progressivism is that there is no "Stop" mechanism. The logic of progressivism dictates that it must continue to grow and spread, like cancer, until it kills its host.

[DomainMaster]

In my opinion, the “progressives” began their rise to national power seats in the 1820s and within 40 years transformed the republic into an oligarchy.

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.

[longtermmemmory]

free will is an enemy of the state.

because James Taggert is blind. (atlas shrugged)

[mjp]

American Progressives built on the difficulties accompanying the North American industrial revolution and following the Civil War.

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.