The Brute-Force Left - “But in your country they lynch Negroes.”

The National Review ^ | February 8, 2015 | Kevin D. Williamson

[The Toll]

Everyone has minorities. That’s not Black Folks though.

[theBuckwheat]

People who view themselves as being from the right or “conservative” must really ponder what kind of values they advocate and defend. Is their end goal to have maximum government that the economy can sustain, so they can have a big and powerful military and use government to impose social values they approve of? Or is their goal to have maximum personal liberty?

The first path takes us to a conservative Utopia through government force. That replaces a liberal Utopia through government force. The issue then is who controls government?

On my part, I advocate the smallest possible government that allows society to be peaceful and orderly, where a person is safe in his property and his liberties. I think people would be surprised at how small a government that would be. That would also imply a very small military and increased obligation by the average citizen to be called to the aid of authorities in the case of riot or insurrection.

It has been my observation that many conservatives relish our powerful military and find it easy to send them off to bomb or invade. Then they find it easy to excuse printing the money to pay for the expedition, thus embezzling the wealth instead of facing the costs honestly through the tax system.

The hard truth is that we have big government and big military because we have been able to embezzle the wealth of the world through the US dollar hegemony. That ability is coming to an end. We cannot print and borrow our way to prosperity. We can only work our way there. But too many Americans have found a way to live at the expense of everyone else and no longer have the will to work. We no longer can have as big a government as we once did. It is time to discover the blessings of liberty once again. It is time for people who consider themselves “conservative” to sincerely ponder just exactly they are trying to conserve.

[Excellence]

From the Soviet five-year plans to Obamacare, all central-planning exercises begin in hubris and end in chaos.

That’s it in a nutshell.

[Brad from Tennessee]

[Central authorities maintained that the collapse was caused by peasants’ hiding their grain crops, despite repeated requests from local authorities that their quota be decreased.]

The Soviet news media supplied a steady stream of propaganda announcing record agricultural feats by the state farm collectives. A common joke was: “If you need milk just take your pail to the radio.”

[Zionist Conspirator]

An excellent article.

[LucyT]

And when the chaos comes, the natural thing to do — the imperative thing — is: find someone to blame. The planners and schemers are intellectually incapable of dealing seriously with the fact that the project that they have set for themselves — substituting their own judgment for that of the billions of better-informed parties in the market and coming up with superior outcomes — is an impossible one. But once you’ve accepted real limits on what planning can do — on what government can do — then you have at some level essentially surrendered to conservatism.

And that means that somebody, somewhere, must be a racist.

[snip]

The Left’s last big idea was Communism. When Lenin turned out to be the god who failed, the Left undertook wide exploration for another grand unifying idea: environmentalism, multiculturalism, economic inequality, atheism, feminism, etc. What it ended up with was an enemies’ list.

That -- and a taste for brute force.

The enthusiasm for coercion and the substitution of enemies for ideas — Christians, white men, Israel, “the 1 percent,” the Koch brothers, take your pick — together form the basis for understanding the Left’s current convulsions.

The call to imprison people with unapproved ideas about global warming,

the Senate Democrats’ vote to repeal the First Amendment, the Ferguson-inspired riots, the picayune political correctness and thought-policing that annoys Jonathan Chait, the IRS’s persecution of conservative political groups, barack ohbama’s White House enemies’ list, the casual violence against conservatives on college campuses and the Left’s instinctive defense of that violence — these are not separate phenomena but part of a single phenomenon.

[Ban Draoi Marbh Draoi]

When did the Senate dems vote to try to repeal the 1st Amendment?

[lentulusgracchus]

Bump. As in, recall the zest of the Khmer Rouge in arresting and executing people for wearing glasses -- it meant they read, and knew things.

[Tax-chick]

Or the Boko Haram in Nigeria. Reports usually say the name means, “Western education is forbidden,” but it’s really “Books Bad!!!”

[lentulusgracchus]

No education needed for that one! That's right down the food chain with Orwell's "Four legs good, two legs bad!"

[Tax-chick]

Leftists need idiot-simple slogans.

[lentulusgracchus]

Leftists need simple idiots.

;)

[Tax-chick]

True ...

[gogeo]

This writer kicks @ss and takes names. Devastating.