Comment Doodlings: NH State Rep Timothy Horrigan - wrong again - Granite Grok

Comment Doodlings: NH State Rep Timothy Horrigan – wrong again

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And DANGEROUSLY wrong to boot.  At Steve’s post “Has Nashua Democrat Rep. Ken Gidge Found a Magic Money Tree?“, Horrigan The Uber-Progressive decided to haul out that old Leftism meme that Government can’t be wrong because WE ARE THE GOVERNMENT:

The United States of America is a republic: we ARE the government. I am not saying the government is perfect, I am not saying it’s not too big, but it’s not some alien enemy force.

Usually Horrigan’s comments are totally off-topic and irrelevant but here he brings up a totally falsity (to coin a word) similar to the Democrat “Government is that thing we all belong to” (and to many of us on the right, it confirms what the Left has done with Govt – it now owns us with no choices).  We ARE the government has that same whiff of collectivism with a dash of “because we ARE, we cannot be wrong, can we?”

The problem, is that it is a totally false premise: we are NOT the Government and nor did the Founders ever have this as a vision.  And he laid in the rebuttal to his argument in his own comment.

A reminder – the Founders held that the highest order of government is to protect our individual Liberty within the context of an ordered society (e.g., not anarchy). But Horrigan is always the opposite – the highest achievement is Government itself and I’m not sure he can be persuaded because, well, that is Progressive heresy. The idea that he is wrong would be earth-shattering and heart rendering.  But I tried anyways – first the opening missive (emphasis and slight editing here):

IS IT TOO BIG, Timothy? Go ahead and say it if it isn’t – if you have the courage of your convictions. And if not, WHAT IS your limiting factor – how big is too big? When will we know that? What SHOULDN’T Govt be doing either in the future or now?

It is THE question that Progressives will never answer – because nothing exists that Government should not be involved.  This is the Socialism and Communitarianism of the Democrat Party summed up by “The Political is the personal, the Personal is the political”.

I am SO tired of that hackneyed phrase “we are the government”. No, we are NOT and this country was NOT designed that way. We were supposed to have a LIMITED Federal Govt, with the “Several States”, but as De Tocqueville observed, there was to be an expansive Civil Society and Individuals in which we’d be taking care of most of what was needed.

In other words, government was supposed to be the junior partner with limited intrusion into Civil Society.  Well, when Socialism arose in Europe, our intellectual “betters” decided that our Constitution was outmoded and that the USA should regress backward to the European model who NEVER had the ideas of Liberty and individualism that our Founders did.  This is the reason why Horrigan and his ilk are not PRO but REgressive – returning us to a darker, less wealthy, and subservient time.  So I told him that:

BUt Progressives hate that idea – because of the lack of top down control. Face it, Timothy, the Democrat Party is nothing but a pack of Progressives – when Bernie Sanders said that he wanted to do away with ALL CHARITIES, the jig was up because that would be the death knell of Civil Society for it would leave only Govt and Individuals – no buffer protecting Individuals from Government (e.g., the LIttle Sisters of the Poor).

No, you all aren’t Progressives – you are taking us BACKWARDS to when Government held TOTAL sway – you’re just doing it one drop at a time.

Yup, Progressive Socialist mouth the words (like Horrigan here) but it is clear that their end goal is total control.  They just can’t be honest about it (can you, Timothy?).

And I finally bring him to the woodshed on his misbegotten LIE:

WE are not the Government. WE elect representatives to head the Government – a distinct and separate entity from “the People and Civil Society”. Those representatives hire our employees (if not directly then through their actions); while those People may be part of that entity we call Government, WE the Individuals are NOT the government. We ARE part, however, of the Civil Society – that entity where we group together, freely associate, for what ever reason and that is NOT part of Government either.

Or wasn’t – Progressives have been both crowding it out, supplanting it, and co-opting it.

All to the detriment of us all.

But no, WE are NOT the Government.

It is dangerous to us all, our kids, and our descendants, for Horrigan’s mindset and utterance to become true.  I believe that a major part of our current difficulties as a country, as a civil society, and for us personally is that the above has not just been forgotten, it is actively being subsumed and obliterated from our public discourse.  Progressives like Horrigan want us to believe that which is not true.  They want us to believe that we can’t do anything without Government (like that time that Carol Shea-Porter just could not understand how Frank Guinta could graduate from college government help – I WISH I could find it to link to it!  The entire discussion had the absolute look of disbelief that Guinta could have done something without help was astonishing – I guess “he couldn’t build” his own education or something).

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