Contributed by: filbert Monday, May 19 2008 @ 09:01 PM CST
The Left’s offer of a life without edges began when Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed Social Security as a kind of investment without risk in 1935. Through payroll deductions, which are simply taxes by another name, Social Security was created with the understanding that the working class would have guaranteed retirement savings. Today, we know that this grand promise of investment without risk has amounted to investment without return. It is impoverishing rather enriching for the hard working people who gain approximately two percent annual interest on their retirement savings in Social Security, while private savings accounts pay eight percent or more annually.
And where is the Left on this issue when a Republican Senator or Congressman calls for privatization of Social Security? They are aligned with Hillary’s and Obama’s position of refusing to look at the facts when people point out the bankruptcy of leftist contrivances like universal healthcare.
In 1947 the Left discovered the Separation of Church and State in the Constitution. This eventually led the benevolent Left to protect us from too much exposure to religion by prohibiting prayer in public schools. Ironically, this new separation from religion “for our own good” has resulted not simply in schools without prayer, but education without morality. But of course, the problem is that the Left is still teaching a morality; it is simply not a Christian one.
It seems to me that much of the difference in worldview between the well-meaning Left and the well-meaning Right is that those on the Left tend to believe that people can be consistently good, honest, kind, and well-meaning, if given the proper leadership. Thus, those on the Left are always surprised when their well-meaning interventions fail–sometimes, as in the Soviet Union, quite spectacularly.
Those on the Right tend to believe that people are in fact quite inconsistently good, honest, kind, and well-meaning. This is why the American Founding Fathers sought to strictly limit the amount of power that we gave to our government.
Limits to the powers wielded by politicians and governments are almost always better than expanding those political powers, because the expansion of those powers tends to have negative unexpected consequences that the Left never anticipates. A life without edges tends to toss a lot of people right off of the edge, in the name of “equality” and “fairness.”
You can never guarantee either. The best that flawed Man can do is strive to provide the best environment for those who choose to may seek to better themselves. That system, from empirical evidence, is truly free-market capitalism tempered by a truly limited government of tightly enumerated powers.
We don’t really have either any more, anywhere on Earth. More’s the pity.