Gee, you think there's a reason why? Let's talk... - Granite Grok

Gee, you think there’s a reason why? Let’s talk…

You think there’s a reason for people not believing in their government?

From The Enterprise Blog – a snippet from Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN):

He also warned that the “whole principle of self-governance as we know it in this country is on trial” as government doesn’t give Americans due credit for choosing life necessities from healthcare to schooling to light bulbs.

…Daniels took a shot at President Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan, “Change you can believe in,” by noting that government needs to promote “Change that believes in you.”

Who believes in you?  Our Founders did – self-governance was one of their main pillars; laid out in the Declaration of Independence and carried out in the Constitution.  But it wasn’t Government that they had in their mind – it was our mind.  Self-governance? No, not our style of Government that we would govern ourselves.  No, not that we would just elect those that would then govern with our consent, but that each of us would govern ourselves.  Their radical idea was that WE, each one of us, had the capability AND THE RIGHT to govern ourselves – Free men with inalienable Rights given to us by our Creator God.  They not just wrote up our form of Government but set up a philosophy by which we became the richest and most power nation in the world.  And we used to be the most free.

The reality is that President Obama’s "fundamentally transforming" America is to transfer that self-governance from the people to a Progressive technocratic State.  From one where each of us is independently self-sufficient to one where the emphasis is on the collective, subservient and dependent on it.  Here are but a few:

Transportation Secretary Ray "It is a way to coerce people out of their cars," Lahood has laid out plans that the Feds will determine our living conditions – via the promoting / withholding Fed dollars for higher density living (re: move it to the cities, people!), emphasis on public transportation, and his utopian vision of  "liveable  communities".  In essence, the freedom that the automobile has given both the American economy AND individuals would be sacrificed for green reasons.  And a diminution of the ability for us to decide where to live, how to live, and our activities in what we can do.  And who said Republicans can’t ascribe to the Progressive State model?  Funny, I don’t remember coerce as being a synonym for freedom;Freedom- his response:

About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people’s lives. So have at it.

Energy Secretary Chu – who can forget his pronouncement of "We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money", feeling just dandy about his choices for our lighting options. 

EPA’s Jackson and Interior Secretary Salazar have decided, for our own good, that our shower heads can be just so "running", our toilets just so "flushy", and that they, not us through our open market decisions, our energy sources and usages (and if not stopped, every little knob and nail for our houses). And just for grins and giggles, also decided to radically change sizes of our families permanently by radically upping the CAFE standards to 56mph -after all, a large family is not going to all ride in a 2 or 4 seater car – and how many families would buy a second car just to have a third child?  And yet, pushing us all to electric cars, how do they expect us to drive anywhere as Jackson is gunning to kill off the coal industry (you know, that fires the plants that would feed the electricity to the batteries).  Can I really use that word -gunning?  Isn’t that hate speech now (oh, that’s more of Education Secretary Duncan’s field, right?)

Attorney General Holder has decided to redefine what is justice and what is not.  His minions have decided to reclassify racism based on the skin color of the person doing the deed and that running guns fraudulently to impugn lawful citizens and their right to bear arms.

Agriculture Secretary Vilsack now is using the "persuasive"power of government – They know what we should be eating:

…that Americans need to “adjust” their tastes so that they like the kind of food the government believes they should eat—and “we have to make sure that what we do is create the appropriate transition.”

President Obama – radically redefining the relationship between our Government in that we will be totally beholden and dependent on Government for our healthcare.  No longer free but shackled with many chains by layers and layers of bureaucracy determining our level of care, who is assigned to provide it, the medications we are allowed to have, and the procedures that can be done.  The massive redistribution of wealth and the debt from wanton spending is causing us to be not a nation that rewards hard work, pluck, and risk taking, and allows failure to that of equal outcomes, crony capitalism, and success based on who you know versus who you are.

A free people?  No, not under these conditions where our "betters" feel free to make the rules and conditions under which we will live instead of us making them for ourselves.  Freedom will be a quaint notion, something that will reside only in dusty  tomes, as our children and grandchildren will effectively be indentured servants, slaving to pay off the massive debt now being racked up at a prodigious rate.  Our poor truly will become the destitute that we see in Third World countries, as there will be no funds left from a failed command and control economy.  There is no freedom without economic freedom.

November is coming – again.  It is ours to choose again -do we choose Freedom, the true Freedom of the Founders, or the false security of Socialism / collectivism?  Reagan said that freedom can disappear within a generation – totalitarianism can last forever. 

I leave you with this long ago post from American Spectator (emphasis mine):

In the administration of President Obama we see the very same totalitarian sentimentality that has been at work in Europe, and which has replaced civil society with the state, the family with the adoption agency, work with welfare, and patriotic duty with universal "rights." The lesson of postwar Europe is that it is easy to flaunt compassion, but harder to bear the cost of it. Far preferable to the hard life in which disciplined teaching, costly charity, and responsible attachment are the ruling principles is the life of sentimental display, in which others are encouraged to admire you for virtues you do not possess. This life of phony compassion is a life of transferred costs. Liberals who wax lyrical on the sufferings of the poor do not, on the whole, give their time and money to helping those less fortunate than themselves. On the contrary, they campaign for the state to assume the burden. The inevitable result of their sentimental approach to suffering is the expansion of the state and the increase in its power both to tax us and to control our lives.

As the state takes charge of our needs, and relieves people of the burdens that should rightly be theirs — the burdens that come from charity and neighborliness — serious feeling retreats. In place of it comes an aggressive sentimentality that seeks to dominate the public square. I call this sentimentality "totalitarian" since — like totalitarian government — it seeks out opposition and carefully extinguishes it, in all the places where opposition might form. Its goal is to "solve" our social problems, by imposing burdens on responsible citizens, and lifting burdens from the "victims," who have a "right" to state support. The result is to replace old social problems, which might have been relieved by private charity, with the new and intransigent problems fostered by the state: for example, mass illegitimacy, the decline of the indigenous birthrate, and the emergence of the gang culture among the fatherless youth. We have seen this everywhere in Europe, whose situation is made worse by the pressure of mass immigration, subsidized by the state. The citizens whose taxes pay for the flood of incoming "victims" cannot protest, since the sentimentalists have succeeded in passing "hate speech" laws and in inventing crimes like "Islamophobia" which place their actions beyond discussion. This is just one example of a legislative tendency that can be observed in every area of social life: family, school,
sexual relations, social initiatives, even the military — all are being deprived of their authority and brought under the control of the "soft power" that rules from above.

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