I just didn’t feel like posting this in Kaydens’ Members blog so it might be that the fellow who wrote it won’t get to read my response but truth is I know a lot of people who think like he does. On the one hand he chastises the current generation because of their sense of entitlement on the other hand he proclaims how great things are with the implication that government is responsible.
Well Mr Contrarian, you can’t have it both ways.
While I would agree that we as a nation have lost our souls, we have traded everything that made us the greatest nation on earth in exchange for those entitlements. Where do you think those people in New Orleans got the idea that the government should bail them out? Could it be because there is nothing in life that they can do that doesn’t involve government oversight? Usually on many levels. Suppose I want to get my toenails clipped, I can’t just go out and hire someone to clip my toenails, whoever does it must have a business license from the government, they have to have a cosmetology license from the government and they have to be subject to government inspection and oversight of their toenail clipping business. We traded our right to hire someone to clip our toenails based on our own qualifications of what makes a good toenail clipper in exchange for the government telling us that someone must be qualified to clip toenails so that they dont screw up the clipping of our toenails.
Yes technology has expanded our horizons and improved our lives, but it isn’t because of government, it is in spite of it.
Yes we can now travel from New York City to Los Angeles in five hours where as at some times in our past it would have taken many months. But now we have to tell the government that we are going, that’s a relatively new development but it’s an ongoing theme. Trade our freedom for a false sense of security, that’s a concept our forefathers held in great disdain.
So you expect me to buy the “this generation is spoiled” argument when it is your ideology that spoiled them? When you give the government more authority over peoples lives they become dependent on government and this surprises you how?
I dont worry about whether I need an iphone or a blackberry, I worry about how I can stay out of jail in a society that has allowed government to make a criminal out of me if I decide I want to make a living clipping toenails. One in five Americans are incarcerated and guess what? Every one of you reading this breaks multiple laws every day. We are a nation of criminals because we have allowed our government to make criminals of us, simply so we can feel safer. And yes, Little Boots has been one pf the most egregious of the usurpers of our freedoms. This time in the name of “the war on terror”
The problem isn’t that our lives aren’t better, our problem is that we have been too ready to lay our freedom at the feet of government in exchange for security.
The first rule of government is that bigger government is better government and no matter the government it always works to that end. Well how much bigger can our government get? When does it collapse under it’s own bloated weight?
So Mr Member don’t bitch about the multitude of people who want the government to take care of them while at the same time advocating that government deserves, even needs the authority to have absolute control over peoples lives. You arent a part of the solution, you are the problem.
4 Responses
Oh how I love Ayn Rand
Where’s the Ayn Rand in this? It just sounds like cheap libertarian dogma. Arguing for liberty by ignoring ethics – and in fact doing so merely to insulate certain behavior from ethical scrutiny – is pointless. Even if you win, you’re doomed to fail. The big government, moral relativist liberals will eat you alive from the bottom up. Just like they did to the Republicans; a once small-government party who tried to base morality on their own version of relativism: religious superstition. The giant state we all live under today is the result.
As Ayn Rand once said: “In any conflict between two men who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent who wins.”
See it’s easy to sit back and criticize when you don’t stand for anything. You can toss around wordslike ethics and almost nobody would disagree that it is important to make sure that people are acting in an ethical manner because everyone applies what they believe to be ethical.
And therein lies the problem with your glib statement…exactly whose ethics are we using here? Who is the arbiter of what is ethical and what isn’t for a person who wants to clip toenails for a living? Or sell gas or groceries, or make pornography?
It’s easy for those who sit on their ass with no real conviction, simply satisfied enough to let government control every bit of their lives and criticize those who want to own their own lives. After all you already laid your life and your freedom and your will at the feet of the federal government, you haven’t anything left worth fighting for….
Who’s ethics? No one’s. Everyone’s. Objective reality’s. What is necessary to keep oneself alive. It doesn’t matter what people believe, or how they might apply those beliefs – morality is objective and the morality of an action can be determined through reason. That is basic Ayn Rand.
What isn’t basic Ayn Rand, as the comment I responded to implied, is your attempt at a defense of liberty. Which, by the way, I am still not exactly sure why you made. Wait, I am sure why – an overzealous attempt insulate to your actions from objective moral judgement by emphasizing that they should be allowed politically – I’m just not sure what rhetoric in that guy’s post prompted it. You talked past him and attacked an argument he didn’t make.
I’m equally as baffeled as to why you used it against me just now. I made no such suggestion that objective moral principles, if they are ever to be followed widely, need to be enforced by government. I merely argued that those actions which the government does take – as well as the many actions it would refuse to take in a free society – have, like all moral human action, an objective justification. That freedom and small government are necessary and justified, not to protect man’s whims, but to protect the free functioning of his mind to rational (ie: ethical) decisions. Such decisions are which sustain his life and bring him happiness, and such decisions can only be made voluntarily. Again, basic Ayn Rand.
I was just defending her views from distortion through false association.