Sitrep from Sensing

As linked on The Smallest Minority:

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...Kevin also referred to my December 2003 post, Bush Republicanism = Roosevelt Democratism?

In it, I concluded thus:

I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free.

Here we are, five years after that post, and Kevin inquires whether my outlook has changed. Yes, most definitely it has. The demise of freedom in this country has accelerated even faster than I imagined back in 2003. With the unconstitutional power grab embodied in the "bailout" bill that passed last week, the federal government now controls the core of the American economy, the credit and investment markets.

This is not one step short of a controlled economy, it is a controlled economy. The secretary/kommissar of the treasury now has the permanent mandate to intervene and indeed take control of the markets in any way he sees fit, anytime he desires.Surely no one is so naive as to think this power will be used only rarely and delicately as time goes on. Rather, the socio-economic engineering urges of future kommissars will be ever less restrained. Remember Steven den Beste's dictum: "The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to their own devices, they will try to regulate everything they can." No one seeks or accepts high, powerful, federal office in order to do little.

I wrote in my 2003 post, ands it is still true today, only worse:

Because the present-day Republicans and Democrats are both big-government activists, they have a foundational philosophy that is the same:

America is a problem to be fixed, and Americans are a people to be managed.

Mark it well: next month we will go to the polls only to elect which politician gets the chance to be the first American proto-despot...

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Read the rest of that post, and pass it to others.



Alea iacta est.