What's wrong with me, she asked in the email? I've got "increasingly angry," and it seems like in the Obama world WASPish values like "hard work, integrity, initiative, accountability, self-determination... have been rendered totally worthless in the blink of an eye[.]"
Reading stuff like that makes me have faith in America. You see, the United States is built upon a faith, a reckless faith, in the idea of a government of limited and specifically enumerated powers. It is built upon the notion that hard work, integrity and the rest will trump power every time. But only if you let it.
We few, we lucky few who believe in this incandescent faith, stand against almost all of history--of power, piracy, and plunder.
But this faith is not just wishful thinking. It is based on the revolution in human affairs since the rise of the commercial city.
In the countryside, land is life. You must have land to survive, and to keep land you must fight for it, or pay someone else to fight for it. In such a world power is everything, for he that does not have power does not have land, and he that does not have land does not eat.
But in the city not power but trust is king. You can only get power by serving your customers, and that power is good only as long as you continue to serve them. It is not collateral that is needed when a banker makes a loan but trust. Said J.P. Morgan, on oath: "Because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom."
The entire program of our lefty friends is built upon the notion that this is rubbish. Marx insisted that the history of mankind is the history of class struggle. Al Gore promised in the election of 2000 to fight for the people against the powerful. President Obama has launched the federal government upon a massive grab for power.
But we say that the spirit of democratic capitalism is that if you limit power, if you separate political power from economic power and moral/cultural power, then you will flood the world with prosperity, with liberty, and with moral elevation.
We conservatives should thank President Obama. He is helping Americans reach clarity on the power and scope of government.
He is proposing to change health care provision in this country to a system in which government experts will decide what kind of health care you will have. Do you think that is a good idea, or do you think that people should have the right to make their own decisions on the matter?
He is proposing a radical change in the way we produce and use energy with a heavy tax on fossil fuels. Do you think this is a good idea, or do you think that the social system of property and the market, under law, should be the way forward?
And let us not imagine that, if Hillary Clinton or John McCain had been elected in November 2008 that we would be in a different place today. President Obama represents the consensus of the ruling class in America, the progressive educated elite. Not surprisingly, the elite believes in elite power, and they believe that they know, based on the knowledge of the experts they have retained, that they know what is best for us.
There is another way. It is baed on the idea that no elite, no experts can know enough to know what is best for us. It is that discovery is the way forward, by individual discovery by ordinary men and women and social discovery in the marketplace. And that means learning from our mistakes. We have all the tools we need to make this system work, and they work every time they are tried. They are law, markets, prices, money, credit, equity, trust, mercy, service, "hard work, integrity, initiative, accountability, self-determination."
They worked for us before, and they will work for us again. But first we have to have the courage and the determination to take our country back.
In my judgment we are seeing already that the courageous and detemined people are already organizing to do just that.
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