Liberty and Tyranny

Subtitle: A Conservative Manifesto, by Mark Levin. I've never read anything by this guy, I've barely heard his name, but ran into the book recommendation off Amazon due to earlier purchases. I didn't learn a lot new since I pretty much keep it with this stuff, but it MAY be a useful "summary book", although I'm not sure it is going to go very far at resonating with any "moderates" yet until the nation descends a whole lot farther.

I like his designation of the "liberal" as "statist". I've talked a number of a times about the difficulty with the term "liberal", since it is anything BUT "liberal" in all of the cases but a narrow band of largely morality related to sex. "Fascist" or "Totalitarian" would be closer to the truth than "liberal", and while I like the Sowel term "un-constrained" even better, the amount of education required to make that term meaningful to enough people is too large. "Statist" is short, and I think gets the critical point across well enough.

I'll start with his Reagan quote at the end of the book:

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on to them to do the same , or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free".

Mark's comment is "We conservatives need to get busy", which is hard to disagree with, but after reading the book, one can easily despair. To be a conservative is to accept this reality in as much truth as we can muster and maybe most of all to accept the flawed and limited capacites of ourselves as humans within the reality. For most conservatives, we pray for the strength of a higher power/reality to help us do that.

Mark draws a quote from Washington's farewell address:

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and m0rality are indespensible results -- and let us wtih caution indulge in the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion"

Levin goes on to say:

"How can it be said, as it often is, that moral order is second to liberty when one cannot survive without the other? A people cannot remain free and civilized without moral purposes, constraints and duties. What would be left but relativism manifesting itself as anarchy, followed by tyranny and brute force?"

He says this on the issue of judicial precedent relative to the Supreme Court:

"If words and their meaning can be manipulated or ignored to advance the Statist's political and policy preferences, what then binds the allegiance to the Statist's words? Why should today's law bind future generations if yesterday's lawy does not bind this generation? Why should judicial precedent bind the nation if the Constitution itself does not?"

One of the things this book does a good job of is showing just how far we have already strayed what is the obvious intent of the Constitution, and how perilous that makes our hold on ANY remaining liberty. While I fear we are a LONG way from getting the kind of control that would be needed to move court rulings back to original intent, I find his arguement extremely persuasive.

He provides this excellent FDR quote on the subject of FICA:

Those taxes were never problems of economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those payroll taxes there so as the give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program".

There is arrogance, and then there is universal and perpetual narcissim of the the FDR and BO sort. The separation of "means" (economics) from "politics". As Burke put it: "What is the use of discussion a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and adminstering them. In that deliveration I shal always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics". Once could easily add, "also before the politician, lawyer, or academic.

The book does a good job of exposing the Ponzi scheme of FICA and medicare, and the fact that all the politicians that promulgated them were well aware that the programs were ruiniousin the future, but sure to be popular in the present. I believe what even the most cynical supporters of the programs underestimated was the insidius ways which they instituted a general irresponsibilty for investment for old age, the idea that it is "OK" or somehow even "virtuous" to fail to pass anything on the the succeeding generation, save debt and ever greater future obligations. The spirtual and moral rot of FICA and subsequent "entitlements", along with the bold faced lies promulgated by their supporters went a very long way to creating the culture of a corrupt "spend it today, have someone else pay it tomorrow" US attitude.

I could go on. He has decent coverage of the Sub-Prime debacle, environmentalism, unions, and other topics, but those were some highlights. I recommend the book -- at some point I likely ought to check into other items that Levin has written.