..or give me death. The real story of the Founding of the nation, by Frank J.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Will the Democrats destroy us all?
Only if we let them.
21 thoughts on “Give Me A Large Government That Spends My Money To Tell Me What To Do”
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The false assumption is that Newsweek’s ratings are objective measures. Actually participation is voluntary and those schools that do take part usually game their numbers. It would be interesting to see this study redone based on SAT scores, graduation rates, and percent accepted at universities.
OOPS…. Wrong thread. Darn small screen smart phone.
Will the Democrats destroy us all?
After over a century and a half of trying, why should they stop now?
Raoul,
I think you mean a century as the Democratic Party of the 19th Century was very much in favor of small government and state rights having risen from the CSA. It was with the 1910 election that it made the sharp left turn.
No, I think we can include the obstinate slavocracy Democratic Party in the “century and a half of Democrats trying to destroy us,”, Tom. I hate to break this to you, but those of us who love liberty don’t approve of license. Just because I disapprove of a man being owned by the government doesn’t mean I approve of a man being owned by another man. It’s ownership itself I oppose, see? It’s wrong whether the slaveowner is a private plantation master or a duly-elected government.
Does Matula have any card but the race card anymore?
Carl, you said, “It’s ownership itself I oppose, see?”
That’s the only out-of-context quote your political opponent would need.
“Carl Pham is opposed to ownership, the bedrock of free-market capitalism and American prosperity!”
Not to worry, George. He’ll use my sex scandals first, the bevy of beauties whose hearts I have cruelly broken through reckless deployment of fierce animal magnetism.
“Does Matula have any card but the race card anymore?”
Yes. He has the dumb card. You get it free when you buy a Hope & Change t-shirt.
[…Schtumpy…thinking to himself]
[but geez Bilwick…I thought…you had to…show the dumb card…to GET them to SELL you…the t-shirt?]
And for ANYONE to bring up the short-sighted, old fashioned, (hard core, truthful) past stances of the Democrat Party, just seems, either mean, or appropriate, depending on the situation.
I am going with appropriate this time. Mostly because I ALWAYS do! The truth has no emotion, so it cannot be mean! If the truth hurts you, perhaps it’s time to change your thinking?
The truth begs nobody’s pardon.
Carl,
You do know the CSA prohibited political parties don’t you? But in any case I was referring to the “Free Silver” movement. Look it up.
Tom, you do know the Democratic Party predated the Civil War, don’t you? How they resurrected themselves from the election of 1876 on, by co-opting the various populist movements, is less my point than their culpability in bringing on the Civil War over their support for the right of one man to own another.
Carl,
You do know that Stephen Douglas believed that the slavery issue should be settled by the public voting on it, not by the federal government mandating a solution. In short just the opposite of the big government solutions you claim they stood for.
Tom, I never said they stood for big govenrment solutions then. I said they brought on the Civil War. Different thing, no? Not all of the sins of the Democratic Party are rooted in Stalinism.
Anyway, if you want perversion from Stephen Douglas (who is otherwise a rather reasonable fellow), try the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and its abrogation of the Missouri Compromise. And if you want more Democratic fecklessness, try Buchanan and the infamy of the Lecompton constitution for Kansas.
As a general theme, let us keep firmly in the mind the distinction between so-called “negative” individual rights (to free speech, assembly, bear arms, et cetera) and “positive” individual rights (to health care, a job, a free lunch).
Both require central government power to enforce. I’m strongly in favor of the first, and strongly oppose the second. That makes me a fan of limited government — limited in how it can push around individual citizens — which means it is very likely small in budget and employees as a side effect.
That is not the same as being essentially an anarchist, someone who believes in a government with the smallest possible budget and fewest possible employees as a primary goal.
I’ve read about the Lincoln – Douglas debates.
Douglas argued the absolute right of the democratic state, including the right of that state to hand one man over as property to another.
Lincoln argued that some matters have a higher morality, that democratic will can not justify an immoral act.
The people of the nation as a whole sided with Lincoln. As does the TEA party today.
If democracy at the state level should trump the federal level on slavery, why should not democracy on the local level prevail?
You do know the Linclon-Douglas debates were in the 1858 Illinois Senate race which Linclon lost don’t you?
Stephen Douglas and the Democrats were looking for a solution to slavery that would avoid violence. So I find it difficult to see how you blame them for splitting the nation.
No, they were looking for a “solution’ to slavery that preserved slavery, and generally used the prospect of violence to extort concessions from those who despised it. No matter how respectable the men in general, their arguments and tactics were those of terrorists holding the integrity of the country hostage to preserve a disgusting institution. (And it was not just disgusting because of the forced labor: by the 1850s the major profit in slavery was slave breeding and trade, a far more contemptible business.)
Furthermore, what made the situation finally intolerable to the North was that Southern Democrats sought to preserve the peculiar institution not just where it had traditionally festered, but to extend it to territories and new states as the country grew, to preserve the power of the slavocracy South in the Federal government. In this they violated the “gentleman’s agreement” (if one can forgive the word “gentleman” in this context) that had preserved the peace from the time of the Founders forward, that slavery would not be extended where it was not already known.
This betrayal was made concrete by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which abandoned the Missouri Compromise, by the rejection of the Wilmot Proviso, which would have allowed the introduction of slavery in lands acquired from Mexico where it had been illegal since the 1820s, and by the ludicrous notion of “popular sovereignty” (championed by Douglas) which argued irrationally that Congress had the power to govern territories fully in every respect except where slavery was concerned. That, and only that, was “up to the people,” except of course when it wasn’t, such as in the travesty of the admission of Kansas as a slave state despite a majority of its inhabitants being anti-slavery.
The great tragedy of the Civil War, or the antebellum South in general, was that a good and noble cause — state’s rights — was co-opted by an evil self-centered movement interested only in its own power and profit derived from human misery. It’s the equivalent of crack dealers taking up the defense of the Fourth Amendment, or the KKK and Nazis the First.
Maybe I should add that the Northern Democrat “compromisers” deserve the blame for the same reason a parent deserves the blame if he enables his teenager’s misbehaviour by always “compromising” and “understanding” when the latter acts like an antisocial jerk.
Had the Northern Democrats sacrificed party unity (and therefore political power) by standing firm against their Southern brethren trying to extend slavery, the latter would have been defeated politically, and the necessity of defeating them militarily might not have arisen. The argument is little different than the charge of appeasement laid at the feet of Chamberlain in 1938.
Carl,
Actually the Democrat Party did split on the issue and Stephen Douglas gave President Lincoln his support when the southern states started succeeding.
But you also mis-characterize the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It provided a means to prevent slavery’s expansion by the new states voting to outlaw it. Under the old “Gentleman’s Agreement” New Mexico and Arizona would have become slave states. That incidentally was the main reason the U.S. didn’t annex Mexico after the Mexican-American War nor buy Baja California. Because both would have been slave areas under the “Gentleman’s Agreement”.