Krimel, Arlo, Marsha, WB-2, Platt, and All --
At the time the United States came into existence as an independent nation,
liberalism literally meant Freedom: freedom for individuals to pursue their
own goals with the least possible government regulation and interference.
This was the concept of "laissez-faire" economics. It was also the ideology
of our Founding Fathers who established America as a Constitutional
Republic, essentially limiting the powers of government to securing "the
Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
By amendment, judicial edict, and the gradual "democratization" of America
over the course of two hundred years, liberalism has taken on a new meaning.
As Thomas Brewton wrote in 2004:
"Today liberalism means that the national state must regulate economic
activity and individual behavior in ways that will promote equal
distribution of all of society's goods and services. This brand of
liberalism is a collectivist concept. Like a pot-luck dinner, whatever
individuals produce is really the common property of society. Liberal
regulators therefore will be the ones to decide how much of what you produce
you will be permitted to keep and how much you must share with other people
whom you don't know and with whom you have no ties of family or friendship.
"This is what requires liberalism to think in terms of collective classes of
people: by race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and economic status.
Liberalism is thus in the contradictory position of claiming that the
individual has primacy, but always subordinating individuality in the
economic realm to what intellectuals decree to be the collective
d." -- [T. E. Brewton: "How Socialists Stole Liberalism"]
No one acquainted with American history can deny this idealistic shift in
our society, or fail to observe that the new administration has taken
political advantage of it. This is what Platt disparages, and I fully
support him. One may argue for sharing the wealth and trading
discriminative judgment for political correctness as "fairer", "less
offensive" or "more egalitarian" for the society as a whole, but the
indisputable fact is that it runs counter to the founding principle of
individual freedom by which this nation rose to greatness.
--Ham
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