Nailed It !
Posted on 03/27/2016 9:55:05 PM PDT by Auntie Mame
I wasn’t able to find a college campus with a little Googling, but like isom35 wrote, Melissa Harris Perry said it.
The closest thing I could find besides that one example was Michelle Obama implying it during a commencement address to a high school.
Somebody’s got to pay for all the free stuff.
Somebody has to sell them the rope to hang us with.
Back in the day, a Civics teacher gave a homework assignment intended to teach - as the teacher smugly said the next day - that “society” meant nothing other than “government.” At the time, I did not accept the teacher’s notion, but I did not then know that the very start of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense puts paid to that idea:SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.Socialists love to use euphemisms - “society” when they mean government,“liberal” or “progressive" when they mean socialist, and so on.Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . .
I, Pencil is an article written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read. The burden of the article is how diffuse are the inputs to make a simple item like a pencil. Of course a particular company - Eberhard Faber, in the example instance - made the pencil. But Mr. Eberhard and Mr. Faber did not simply speak the pencil into existence; the company has to have buildings housing machinery, and workers to operate the machines. But beyond that, the Eberhard Faber workers have to have food, shelter, and normal amenities - including those required by their families.
And the same is true of the vendors who supply Eberhard Faber with the machinery they require, and all the obvious materials - wood, graphite, rubber, and the ferrule material and the enamel. All those vendors have their own equipment, workers, and supply chain. And in all cases the workers need food, shelter, and normal amenities. So although the pencil certainly does not exist without Eberhard Faber, society works together to make the pencil. And everything else.
The correct word for all the support which surrounds the total production of the pencil - or anything else - is society. Not government, note well, society.
That's really about all there is to it.
A pet peeve of mine is the fact the we are considered - that most of us consider ourselves to be “conservative."Socialism conserves the stage in which the society existed at the time it was overtaken. Cubans still drive American cars from the 1950s, North Koreans still dress in the fashions of the same bygone era, and in the USSR I grew up in a government-owned house that was taken from the rich and given to the needy in 1920s and remained without indoor plumbing or running water and with ancient electrical wiring until it was condemned and demolished in 1986.
In economic terms, socialists are hyper conservative. And the worst of it is that, aspoints out, if you aren’t trying to improve, you are regressing. The highest aspiration of a socialist economy is stasis; in practical terms this guarantees a worsening economy.
- In Search of Excellence:
- Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies
by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H., Jr. WatermanAt the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.
But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us.
And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation - we know that just as surely as we know that every American marketer loves to boldly proclaim that whatever product he is flogging is NEW!
This certainly puts paid to the fatuous claims of socialists to be “progressive.”
Bookmarked.
A pet peeve of mine is the fact the we are considered - that most of us consider ourselves to be “conservative.”
You are correct.
Today’s Liberals/Progressives are anything but “Liberal”.
PROGRESSIVE = REPRESSIVE.
Too true!
The Progressive assault on the limited constitutionalism of the Founders set the stage for modern liberalism and the rise of big government over the past century. Here are three must-reads and some basic Q&As to get a handle on Progressivism and Liberalism. When you're ready for more, read the primary sources yourself and explore Progressivism and Liberalism in greater depth.
Man, I hate it when people truthfully point that out!
Yeah, I don’t think so.
First of all, it all depends on what you are trying to “conserve”. There are old school Soviet Communists in Russia who are referred to as “conservatives”.
If anything, “We” are Constitutional Conservatives, for which the term “conservative” is just an abbreviated form.
Finally, I believe the actual term is “conservativism”...defining the common belief system of conservatives. “Conservatism” would have its adherents known as “conservats”. Are you a conservat?
Unfortunately, nobody uses it. The language is going the way of the Dodo Bird.
BTTT
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sorbonne:Socialism is actually nothing other than mere criticism ofcapitalistssociety’s default organization. By default, people freely cooperate. They do so within family units in more or less authoritarian arrangement. But in society at large, people cooperate primarily through the mechanism of bargaining and money.Socialism promises regression from the adult-to-adult bargaining paradigm back to the infantile dependence on a (putatively wise, efficient, loving and equitable) government in lieu of real human parents. But far from being a wise, efficient, loving, and equitable, quasi-parental unit, government is, as Thomas Paine put it, “a punisher.” It is therefore no accident that a government which assays to be a provider defaults into an enslaver (I initially placed the word “merely” before “a punisher,” but that is not accurate. Government is capable of carrots as well as sticks. But the apparent immediate effect of the stick inevitably seduces its holder into overestimating its long-run positive value. “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail").
In a prior reply I mentioned that back during my teens (i.e., during the Eisenhower Administration) a teacher said, “We like to say ‘society’ when we mean government.” The correct reply to that would have been, it now occurs to me, to ask Lincoln’s question:
”If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”
The answer is four. If you call a tail a leg, it still is not a leg.
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