The inherent corruption of unlimited government

"The reason I became a Republican [was] because I did not want to vote for Democrats. This will be the same reason when I leave the Republican Party," writes Minh-Duc of State of Flux in an eloquent personal Declaration of Independence from a party he says will have left him -- in the Reagan sense of his former party, the Democrats, having left him -- if they elect Ray Blount as House Majority Leader:

I became a Republican long before I became a US citizen, long before I came to the US, long before I was old enough to vote. I was a young boy in Vietnam listening clandestinely to Voice of America (VOA) over a short wave radio . . . There, on that old short wave radio, President Reagan gave the "evil empire" speech. Living in a Soviet vassal state, I already knew that they were evil. The inherent evil of the Soviet Union was obvious. But not a single US President had the moral courage to say [the] thing as it was -- not until Ronald Reagan. I knew then that he would be the greatest US President in my life time.

I came to the US in the last year of [the] Reagan Presidency. That was when I learned that my favorite US President is a Republican. I also learned that he favors limited governement. With the past experience with the government where I came from, limited government is a wonderful idea.

Reagan brought me into the party, Newt Gingrich made me a believer. I was an enthusiastic supporter of the Conservative Revolution. Now I fear that the Revolution is dead.

We quoted Minh-Duc -- alongside Peggy Noonan and Hugh Hewitt -- here the other day in arguing the case for the Republicans to get back to their limited-government roots and reduce the source of corruption by reducing the size of government. As Minh-Duc notes:

The current leadership race for the majority leader will determine if the Republican Party is still the Party of Reagan, and that the Conservative Revolution is still alive. Roy Blunt is cut from the same cloth as Tom Delay. He is an opportunistic politician who speaks of small government but funds big government.

But don't look for the Republican leadership to lose much sleep over the inherent corruption of unlimited government. They've got too much "invested" -- to use Paul Chesser's word in his must-read American Spectator article, "It's Not Just Pork" [via Mark Tapscott] -- in the status quo.

A clamor against special appropriations -- pushed in Congress by House Majority Leader candidates John Shadegg of Arizona and John Boehner of Ohio -- is growing, and certainly promising. But while the focus is on pork, attention should also be paid to two other insidious products of meddlesome government: economic development incentives and eminent domain . . .

"Invest" is the favorite buzzword of politicians -- both Democrat and Republican -- who like to use other people's money to take chances in risky businesses. The results are often as scandalous as anything Abramoff has perpetrated.

As is the Supreme Court-endorsed practice of employing eminent domain to give private property to developers, also in the name of economic development . . .

What it represents is a pervasive attitude throughout government, and extending through both political parties, that there are no rights of the people other than those granted by those in political power. Local and state government, with eminent domain and economic incentives, merely represent the farm system that leads to the big-time pork playground.

Will our Porkbuster allies in Congress, together with a new Supreme Court less inclined to discover new "rights" in a "living Constitution," be able to counter what Patrick Chisholm in the Christian Science Monitor calls the insidious "triumph of the redistributionist left."? Or is it too late? Did the commies, via "Stalin's meme war" -- as  Eric  S. Raymond [via InstaPundit] wrote yesterday -- win our citizens' hearts and minds after all?:

So: we know the Soviets aimed to apply Gramscian subversion as a war weapon against the West, we know they believed themselves to have succeeded in significant ways, and the dominant cultures of the entertainment industry, the press, and academia behave today precisely as we would expect if they had succeeded in those ways (that is, they sneer at traditional values and patriotism and exhibit pervasive left-wing and anti-American bias)

Check out our The Tocquevillians Strike Back for more about Marxist intellectual and politician Antonio Gramsci's role as the father of today's pervasive and debilitating political correctness. As the title of that post suggests, we're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take this any more.

Technorati tags:  Porkbusters, Peggy Noonan, Hugh Hewitt, John Shadegg, John Boehner

Comments

[goomp]

Our future, the future of our democracy, hangs in the balance. Powerful forces are pushing for a socialist government run country. An example is the barely 51 to 49 percent vote by the Auto Workers union members to offer any assistance to the companies in reducing costs so that they can avoid bankruptcy. If the values and ideas of the liberal left have been inculcated in the majority of our now maturing generations, the future of Western civilization does look to be in danger.