Common Ground...can't we all just get along? - Granite Grok

Common Ground…can’t we all just get along?

Let’s keep about the “why” – Here’s a great example of what undergirds the GOP civil war – by Andrew McCarthy at PJ Media (emphasis mine):

The statist side is enthusiastically championed by Democrats, and the conservative side by Republicans, albeit more reluctantly. Like the Democratic party, the GOP is run by Washington-oriented politicians and, thus, is more enamored of Washington-centered fiats than is the conservative base whose support Republicans need in order to be politically viable. In the vogue of establishment Republicans, Jeb Bush ostensibly directs his “Can’t we all just get along?” preachments at the Republican-Democrat divide. Clearly, though, as an all-but-formally-announced contender for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nod, he is more vexed by the widening disconnect between Republicans and conservatives.

Here is the problem for Jeb: There is no common ground between (a) “I should control my own medical decisions, with my doctor deciding what to charge for his services and my insurance company deciding what risks it will cover, at prices to be determined by a free market,” and (b) “The federal government should oversee my medical decisions, tell the doctors what to charge, and dictate what insurance companies must cover at what rates.” In this, as in other matters Gov. Bush calls the “bigger, more pressing issues” – the issues about what kind of country we are going to be – one side has to win and one side has to lose.

McCarthy has it exactly right – either I decide as an adult or Government decides for me. Go ahead, tell me what the middle ground is there, what is the compromise there?  It truly is a binary decision – either I decide or I can’t.  Trite to say, but if I can’t, and more and more “I can’t”, I am no longer Free.  That IS the battle – and it seems that Republican “moderates” either haven’t figured it out (and thus don’t “get” this altogether) or don’t care.  I don’t go along with the meme of  ‘well, times change” or “what difference does it make” if Government decides for me.  If other want to outsource their responsibilities for themselves – let them.  I certainly want to stop me having to pay for their stay in the Government hammock – and I fear the next thing after healthcare that the greedy denizens in the Leviathan organization want to take from us next.  With “centrist Establishmentarians”  seemingly standing by their side.

We do not have what Bush calls “instances of crisis” because people are uncivil, or because competing sides are, as he says, merely trying to “win a political point.” We have them because there is no sensible compromise on these fundamental controversies. Each side is trying to persuade Americans of the rightness of their antithetical visions for our society.

It comes down to that classic Libertarian question: “Who owns me?”  Do I do?  Or does Government?  Am I fully in charge of what I do and what I can do?  Or only that which I am allowed to do?  And to that latter point, it seems that the “allowed” space keeps getting smaller and smaller – in no small part by those Republicans who have lost sight that Individualism matters (or more to the point, no longer care).

Bush, like George Will, is wrong in suggesting that conservatives are unwilling to compromise. The most underreported fact in the recent shutdown controversy – and the fact most under-exploited by those leading the charge against Obamacare – was this: Conservatives do not want the federal government funded at today’s unsustainable levels. The monstrous size and scope of the federal government is largely what animates the Tea Party. Yet conservatives compromised on this point of great consequence to them, agreeing to fund government on the Democrats’ astronomical terms … except for Obamacare. It was President Obama who declined to seek common ground: refusing to compromise with conservatives despite having lawlessly compromised on Obamacare with corporations, cronies and Congress (members and staff) who did not want it applied to them.

And why should Obama compromise?  He is on the cusp of having the “common good” Collective triumph over Rights of the Individual.  He just wants people like me, the TEA Party, to either roll over or get rolled – and the Establishment Republicans have the same goal for the TEA Party folks like me.

In our system, we settle such fundamental controversies democratically: by elections or, between elections, by having elected officials exercise the relative powers the Constitution gives them to press their position until one side yields. Our health-care battle lends itself only to this kind of resolution. Again, there is no common ground between (a) “The government has no authority to make me pay for your healthcare – no more than it has to make me pay for your flat-screen TV,” and (b) “The government has the authority to confiscate its chosen percentage of my property in order to pay for your medical treatments that government deems necessary.”

There being no common ground, Gov.[Jeb]  Bush’s notion of “common ground” translates into: Let the Democrats have their way.

No.  No more lurching ever more Leftward.  Fighting “less” still means Leftward to a socialist endpoint. And yes, we fight, not to go Rightward as the statists all claim we want to do, but downward – and back to our roots.  BTW, going back to the Constitution, its values, and its philosophy is not Rightward.

Just Right.

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