Someone found this portion of my last Townhall column objectionable:
Obama needs to man up and be honest with us about his vision for American government. He needs to state openly that his choice for Americans is, to use the words of Ronald Reagan in 1964, “to abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
I rarely give free links out for this kind of criticism, but this particular one is rather instructive and, as best I can tell, not a straw-man attempt on the part of some other libertarian to paint a false picture of how paranoid and naive the Left can be in their willingness to subject themselves (and unfortunately the rest of us as well) to the rule of the state over every aspect of their lives:
No, the idea is that government employees in Washington can plan our lives for us better than a bunch of greed maddened, immoral, thieving CEO’s. You got a problem with that?
Yes; several in fact:
- You seem to have a fatalistic viewpoint that your life will be planned by others.
- You appear to believe those others are either government employees or CEOs.
- Even if one accepts the barking notion that CEOs plan your life, one cannot overlook the blatantly obvious: government employees are backed with the coercive power of government (i.e., legal violence if you don’t do what they say) to plan your life, whereas your association with any CEO or company is purely voluntary and any violence to enforce a supposed plan for your life would be illegal.
- You attach “greed maddened, immoral, thieving” only to CEOs, missing a rather target-rich environment for those labels with respect to the government.
- Also, have you seen the people who you want to run your life? I wouldn’t let them pick a shirt for me, let alone a doctor for my family.
Finally, you are not addressing my central point, that Obama needs to man up and stop being dishonest with us about the true nature of his policies. Restating what I said Obama needs to say in order to be honest with us is also admitting his dishonesty while seeking to distract us from it.