The Upper and Nether Millstones

PJ Media/Belmont Club ^ | 8/19/2014 | Richard Fernandez

[mojito]

...Michael Brown and the paramilitarized Ferguson Police Department are two sides of the same coin. They are the joint product of the politics of grievance and the growing expansion of government. The taxes that made the mobs dependent also armed the paramilitary police that contain them. You have one government department handing out Obamaphones and another handing out MRAPs to the cops. HHS gives out Obamacare and the IRS enforces it.

A giant bureaucracy tasked with providing all “positive rights” rumbles on, even as progressive politics unleashes more “community organizers” while erecting a giant political machine to meet those same growing expectations. It calls to and answers itself. The result on a community scale is Ferguson. The result on a national scale is Barack Obama.

Dependence is met with welfare; crime countered by replacing the family — after destroying it first — with state adoption and child protection agencies.

[....]

The Great Society — that pale foreshadowing of the real thing into whose realm we are now beginning to enter — sketched out the draft of paradise. And its vision was a multitude demanding to be given things on one side and a great soulless, armored bureaucracy shoveling it out to them on the other. From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed. It is a Soviet distribution line taken to the scale of a continent. One name for this is socialism. The other name for it, people will soon discover, is fascism. Any government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to shoot you dead in the street, no questions asked. The only difference between socialism and national socialism is a single word.

[mojito]

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.

[lormand]

Listening to the 'police are too militarized' crowd, one would think that the Ferguson police officer rolled his up-armored Humvee over a boy scout who was just crossing the road. Like most everyone else, I oppose the militarization of federal department, but the local police need to armor up according to the culture of the city they patrol.

Perhaps one of the reasons why looting and rioting has gone for so long is because of pandering buffoons like Rand Paul. The police are paralyzed from action because of idiots like Paul. Instead, they should be shooting looters and cracking the heads of those hurling missiles at them.

Libertopians - anarchists who hate taxes

[AceMineral]

Numbers that add up to nothing.