Saturday, March 14, 2009

Tom Paine's Common Sense is uncommon at present

from the beginning of COMMON SENSE

OF THE ORIGIN AND DESIGN OF GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL.

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer! Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.
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Now, I have to ask: Has anyone in the Obama administration ( or Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid et al ) ever read Common Sense? Understood it? Believed it? We see simultaneously the greatest expansion of GOVERNMENT ever, with an inevitable rise in taxes while, at the same time, seeing a diminution in allocations for NATIONAL SECURITY. The belief that we get our needs fulfilled by government does not derive from the founding of the Republic, nor from common sense.

With many references to history being incorrect ( e.g. going back thirty years does not yield a happy time in the relations between Iran and the U.S. although this might be a deficit in arithmetical as well as historical knowledge ), it behooves us to go back even further. Aristotle warned that, when the majority in a democracy can off-load the burdens of taxation onto a minority, "it will destroy the polis."

We are getting to the tipping point where enough voters will not be paying Federal income taxes so that they will be cheerfully supportive both of increasing tax rates on those who do, and on reaping the benefits of entitlements they don't pay for. The situation will spiral out of control as Aristotle's "common sense" indicated 2500 years ago.

One reason the "polis will be destroyed" comes from any school of economics one might subscribe to. While Rational Economic Man who doesn't pay taxes will vote for an administration such as the present one, REM with Rational Expectations who DOES belong to the increasingly small group which does pay taxes will so order her affairs as to minimize both taxes and her contribution to the "other." This will result in diminished productivity and job creation in favor of leisure and selfish activities or even movement. (The governments of California, New York and New Jersey are going to see this last and people will, at the margin, be spending that extra month or two in Florida or Arizona to warrant a change in residency.)

Another reason our particular polis will be damaged is the harm done to voluntarism. One has already noted the paucity of private charitable giving done by both Biden and Obama; others draw the reasonable conclusion that, if the government is going to provide all things required, and extracting taxes for the purpose, there is little need for private philanthropy. That will kill one of the things that de Toqueville identified as part of American Exceptionalism. Of course, the present administration seems not to believe in American Exceptionalism.

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