So look back at two of the chief disputes from 2010. You will find something curious in the kernels.
The first debate concerned health care reform. Strip away the seemingly endless details, and the argument from advocates boiled down to a simple proposition: that health care should be “a right for every American.” That is how Barack Obama put it in a 2008 debate. A year and a half later, in March of 2010, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that America has a “responsibility to ensure that health care in America is a right, not a privilege.” Sen. Chris Dodd agreed: “Every single American has a right to health care,” he said around the same time. Again and again, advocates of health-care reform reiterated the point that health care is a right.
Now a right to health care differs from other rights, such as the right to free speech or freedom of worship. Those rights demand nothing of others but noninterference. By contrast, medical care is an economic good, requiring resources. It must be provided by someone. If Joe needs medical care and cannot pay for it, then to say he has a right to medical care is to say someone else must give it to him, or buy it for him. It means he has a claim on someone else’s resources that cannot be denied.
This point was made explicit when the individual mandate came under fire. When conservatives argued that the government had no legitimate authority to make an individual buy health insurance, liberals replied that it did, and that (by implication) the individual had no right to decline.
Fast-forward to autumn, and the debate over the Bush tax cuts. Again and again, extension of the cuts was described as a handout. “We just can’t afford that kind of giveaway to the very wealthiest among us,” said Sen. Kent Conrad. “It’s a huge giveaway to the super-rich,” agreed Rep. Jim McDermott. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka called the tax cuts “unconscionable . . . giveaways for our country’s wealthiest.” To the Los Angeles Times, they were a “windfall.” NPR’s Cokie Roberts called them “giving something away.” The Washington Post’s Ruth marcus (who also appears in this paper) described preserving the cuts as “giving more money to those least likely to spend it.”
All of which sounds strange. Treating the failure to take someone’s money away from him as if it were the same as giving money to him is a very funny way to talk. By contrast, we would never say that a childless couple had “given a child” to a family of four, simply because the childless couple did not kidnap one of the children from the other family. The liberal Democratic penchant for describing tax cuts as giveaways discloses an assumption: that people, especially rich people, have no right to their money to begin with. In fact, it is not really theirs. After all, you cannot give something to someone who already owns it.
Put that lesson from the tax-cut debate next to the lesson from the health-care debate, and you end up with something like this: Joe Citizen has an inviolable claim to other people’s money – but not to his own.
How weird is that?
Well. Not so very weird, frankly.
After all, from the perspective of progressives, Joe Citizen gets his rights from the government, not naturally — and so government gets to decide what is best for Joe, how, and why.
This is the “progressive” way: they killed off God / natural rights and put themselves in a position of godhead.
Very sporting of them. And sadly, too many of us let them get away with it — a little smoking ban here, and little soda tax there…. To borrow a formulation, pretty soon we’re talking about real moneyliberty.
Good.
And it is Liberty which is the focus of the question we must pose. Talk today, I mean, has taken on a tendency to be about “Constitutionalism” but oh my brother, that ain’t it. The fight is betwixt Liberty and some warped notion of Equality. Constitutionalism gets to be an obscuring proxy, at best.
It comes down to a question. Who owns you? And to continue in the Chicago style. We don’t want nobody, that nobody owns.
I see that I should have perhaps used “They” in place of “We”.
Weird or not, I applaud Hinkle for that formulation. It’s the sort of argument I like to have in my toolbox; the sort of thing liable to cause cognitive dissonance in my debate partners.
And, unfortunately, you can no longer “lite out fer the territories” to get away from the control freaks. And it’s illegal to shoot the bastards, at least under most circumstances.
Now I’m depressed.
“giving more money to those least likely to spend it.”
I love that line. We should definitely give all of our tax money to junkies, crackheads and pop stars. They’ll spend that dough.
Just to be clear, is it unamerican that such things be enacted at all, or unamerican that they be enacted at the federal level?
re #7
Can we just jump ahead to the part where you write “Correct” and skip past all the useless bullshit you’ll put forward in between?
#7 – both.
And, some of this shit may be occurring on the local level, but are being lead (and funded) by huge national groups. Kinda like the “Fair Vote” movement.
#8 – certainly. I see a lot of “founding fathers”, “constitution”, “enumerated powers”, and “original intent” here. Nothing wrong with any of that. And it all orbits around “the role of government”. But those topics aren’t about the role of government. They’re about the role of federal government. And they’re not really about the fight against statism either. Getting back to a limited federal government doesn’t really do anything about the pseudo-nation of California and its statist tendencies.
#9 – and their’s nothing the least bit unconstitutional about that.
Something can be unamerican without being unconstitutional. Switching terms as one sees fit is either sloppy or dishonest. A speaker who’d established a reputation for arguing in good faith might enjoy the benefit of the doubt; one who has established a reputation for evasion, shit-stirring and richly ironic condescension shall enjoy no such indulgence.
Re #8
Oooh, burn!
Can something be unamerican if it’s supported by a vast majority of Americans?
#13
Ask Frederick Douglass.
Soda bans usually occur in public schools, but banning smoking from private restaurants and bars regardless of the owner’s wish is both unamerican and unconstitutional.
I don’t really give a shit what the dipshit lawyers in bath robes say about it.
Can something be unamerican if it’s supported by a vast majority of Americans?
Yes.
Yes, it can Alex. America is a nation founded on personal liberty and freedom, and the right to governing coming from the consent of the governed; and functioned that way well into the first half of the 20th century. It function well because of the by-and-large good faith and actions of the citizenry and their representatives in local and national government.
To transform that same societal system by anything less than an openly stated constitutional change into one where rights stem from government instead of existing inherently in a person by thier being, or one in which the individual freedom or liberty of a person is reduced to a mere component part of a collective would be criminal.
If a soda tax was merely a tax like any other on a food product that would be fine. But it has been openly declared to be punitive in nature and intended to be behavior shaping; that is, the nannies have decided that soda = obesity, so lacking the stones to pass a law banning it, as is their want, they instead institute an insidious tax. In that vein, the punitive, behavior modifying intent, depriving one the right to choose to drink soda all day long and be as big as a house should that occur, it’s un-American. The same is true with smoking bans; especially out-of-doors in unenclosed areas where the notion of second-hand-smoke-poisoning is ludicrous at best.
The Democrats have “sold” a signifigant number of low information, low involvement, and generally uninvolved voters on the notion that the benevolent state they view as a utopian construct always acts in their interests, knows what’s best for them, and will take care of them; and have provided financial incentives in the form of monetary payments and other free goods and services to butress that professed notion. They form a reliably solid voting block with the 15 to 20 percent of citizens that believe statist socialism, nannying cradle to grave, paid for by robbing the rich of course, will always underwrite that tyrranical vision.
And it matters not whether the “true believers”, the 20% I spoke of, came by the ideas by careful considersation, or peer pressure/indoctrination at public schools or academic institutions; because by the time they realized that an error was made, the state and apparatchicks in charge would never allow it to be reverted back.
So just because a significant portion of the public could be bribed, cajoled, or otherwise beguiled into voting to turn America into a Euro-socialist “workers paradise”, that wouldn’t necessarily make it “American” in the sense that it comports with the ideas by which this nation was founded and prospered for more than 200 years.
Guys, I believe the response you’re looking for is “Correct.”
Makewi, that one should sting a little bit. So, by alex’s calculus anything that a majority of Americans find ok is automatically “American”. Silly reasoning, there. Or what Squid said.
Well, on the unintentionally hillarious side of things, if Alex does manage to win his argument, he’ll prove that gay marriage is in fact unamerican.
For that matter, NOT having the 10 commandments in public courthouses, NOT praying in public spaces and NOT making our public war memorials out of crosses is all also fundementally unamerican behavior.
Also, arabs are possibly unamerican.
Well, Alex, a vast majority of Americans don’t support unlimited abortion. They do support prayer in the schools. Which of those would you consider unamerican?
A vast majority of Americans didn’t support Obamacare, either. Does that make Obama unamerican to you?
I think #14 shut him up for awhile, but he’ll be back. He loves hisself some abusive taxes.
Ha. Yaoi Boy got his ass handed to him on that one. But then Yaoi Boys likes them some pain and humiliation.
#14 – Wait. What?
Unconstitutional? Which constitution – the federal constitution or state? Which state?
Correct. And as a result you have natural variations in legislation around parts of the country. California has strict clear air laws, Mississippi’s made it about impossible to run an abortion clinic, and Kansas thought it would be a good idea to require the teaching of intelligent design. All fine, because when your state does something bat-shit stupid, you have the freedom to work to change the law, or move.
Who says it’s unamerican? Enacted at the state level, it’s certainly not against the US constitution. And depending on the area, may reflect the desires of the people of that area. And if it does not, the people have recourse known as the ballot box. Were blue laws unamerican?
Yes, I tend to think a large swath of the voting block are pretty stupid, and they are generally manipulated by the right and left who get elected by saying the most retarded things imaginable. Unlike many here, I don’t overestimate the intelligence of the electorate. Overall, it doesn’t really matter who’s elected, because the politicians are by and large corrupt. A fact that the tea party will soon be forced to face.
All great issues to be decided at a state level, no? If Alabama wants to set itself up as a theocracy, I don’t particularly care, because no one has to live there. You do get that in a system where more things are decided at a state level, the “national opinion” isn’t so relevant, right?
it is simply not possible for alex to be a bigger flaccid prick.
Alex, you are a master of missing the point. Plus you don’t understand un-American.
It’s American to give individual inalienable rights precedence in governing. Property rights is American. No theocracy is American. Sin taxes are not.
I do agree the bilk of government power and responsibility needs to be transferred back to the states where it belongs though.
Let the blue states grow government, and the red states grow private enterprise, and see who wins.
alex likes to answer things with questions that beg. more cupcakes for all on hf’s dime
alex buggers Joe.
alex buggers Joe.
Yep, he’s a Yaoi Boy.
All taxes are punitive unless they are use taxes. Alex lurvs the control of the taxes. More taxes please. says Alex.
Your kidnap analogy is one of the most perfect analogies I’ve ever encountered. Took a scalpel to that one, JG.
Oops! I see that analogy was in the quoted text. My bad.
[…] the leftoids are going to continue to insist that nothing belongs to anyone without their leave, that no tiniest portion of life can proceed without their micromanagement, that everything that […]
Yet those same Democrats who believe in an ever-benevolent government also believe that government employees need unions to protect them from government abuse. Could there be a more perfect example of doublethink in action?