A Doxology of the Left
If you find yourself agreeing, even sleepily, to three or
more of the italicized propositions below, you may proudly count yourself a man
or woman of the left.
1) A Feodor Dostoevsky character exclaims in one of his
novels, “If there is no God, anything is possible.” There is no God, and anything is possible.
2) Punishment is no answer to crime, because crime is a social disorder that should be treated by
psychologists and sociologists, not prison wardens, and social disorders may be
adjusted through the adjustment of antique societal structures.
3) Laws and
punishments do not restore order. They exacerbate social disorder and
provide employment to lawyers and law schools.
4) Both education and
parenting are forms of oppression. See Paulo Freire’s book, The
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, copyright 1970.
5) “History is bunk”
– Henry Ford.
6) The present must
always trump the past, because the past is over.
7) Freedom is a danger
to posterity and must always be “overseen” and regulated by enlightened
politicians and “experts.”
8) The U.S.
Constitution, regarded in the same manner as statutes, should have no more
hold over us than infinitely adjustable and perfectible state laws.
9) Not the betterment of the state but the exercise of power is the
whole of politics. “Government,” George Washington said, “is force.”
10) Despite what you have heard – “the exception proves
the rule” – the operative principle of any modest leftist is: Any exception to a rule invalidates the
rule.
11) Regulation is
ownership. It is no longer necessary for socialists and aspiring communists
to seize the means of production in order to wrest political power from greedy capitalists.
It is enough to make them pay for regulations, which achieves the same purpose.
12) Our constitutional
separation of powers is enhanced when
any of the three separated powers collude to advance their separate interests;
immodesty, in this regard is a public benefit that does not perversely eviscerate
the constitution, for how can a public benefit be unconstitutional?
13) What is the difference between a millionaire and a
billionaire? Answer: The billionaire is 1,000 million times more evil than the
millionaire.
A Threnody of the
Right
If you find yourself agreeing with three or more of the
following propositions, you may be an emergent man or woman of the right.
1) Whatever is taxed
tends to disappear.
2) There is no such thing as a perfect undeveloped technology.
3) Creativity, not
profit, is the yeast in the conservative loaf.
4) You will get more
of what you finance, however harmful.
5) Corruption lies
in the ganglion of complexity.
6) Humor is by nature
conservative because it depends on jarring disproportions, and the humorist
must first apprehend right proportion to make a joke.
7) If you can’t produce
a product, political or otherwise that sells, you must rely in force to peddle
the product.
8) The opposite of
democracy is governmental force.
9) The relationship of a socialist government to the people
is an inverse one: the more
prosperous the government, the poorer the people; the more powerful the
government, the weaker the people; the loftier the government, the more
suppressed is the general population.
10) Modesty in
government affairs is a revolutionary doctrine.
11) The left in the United States does not wish to initiate any
savings, because a dollar saved is a
dollar lost to future spending, and spending plays the same role among
leftists, many of whom are “practical atheists,” as does grace in the Christian
religion.
12) More
centralized government is not better government.
13) In a politics that depends entirely on numbers and force,
truth and the political good are
fugitives and partisan fantasies.
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