Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to I'd agree with some of what you say

And on distrust of government...
TB — (archived)

I just don't get the objection other than your profound distrust of government. Did some city councilman talk nasty to you once?

This coin has two sides. Why do I distrust government? An equally-valid question is, why do so many people trust government so deeply?

Hundreds, if not thousands, of years of history have shown that governments have done more damage, ruined more societies, caused more poverty, and caused the deaths of more people, than any other general entity. This researcher actually coined the term "democide."

"Progressives" focus narrowly on glaring exceptions to government power--tiny monocultural "bedroom nations" like Sweden. They ignore the overwhelming trend over history for governments to accumulate ever more power to themselves, and for the people under them to become worse off. This is ignored. To them, there is no problem that can't be solved with a little more government power, a few more regulations, a few more taxes, and a bit more control over our freedoms.

When a liberal visualizes the perfect future, they have a vague picture of a sunny landscape covered with solar panels and windmills, and people riding mass transit, bicycles, and electric cars happily to work in a society where we are all watched over by Bureaucrats of Loving Grace. They see the U.S. evolving into some kind of giant middle-class Sweden, yet somehow still provided with all the wonderful technologies and living standards capitalism and industry have generated. California is a perfect example, refusing to use its own resources while happily importing energy and goods from less-fussy locations.

Oddly, nobody ever sees us devolving into a poverty-stricken socialist tyranny. Nobody thinks Venezuela, North Korea, U.S.S.R., China, East Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, North Vietnam, or Zimbabwe.

And that's just a list off the top of my head of the 20th century. Run it back a few thousand years, and see what your list looks like. Then match that list against all the "Swedens" you can think of.

In short, I have one hell of a good objective reason for distrusting too much power in the hands of government.

People forget that the United States and western democracies are historical exceptions, and like other reasonably-free societies in history, constantly teetering on the edge. Over a hundred million died last century on the altar of philosophies dedicated to "the good of the people."

The only threat a progressive ever seems to see is some kind of "rule of the corporation," something that has rarely happened in history. Even if you consider our own "Gilded Age" as the prime example of an unchecked market system run wild, individual liberty and progress under that system left other nations of the time in the dust, never mind later communist nations.

I've studied this half my life. You really think my views are because I ran afoul of a city councilman?

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