When I first read this at BusinessWeek (of all places!) after doing the show yesterday with our interview with NH State Senator Gary Lambert , it stopped me dead in my tracks (emphasis mine):
The United States has no purpose. That is perhaps its greatest achievement. America’s founding document, its Declaration of Independence, allows that a state exists only to secure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That’s it. There’s a curious lack of ambition in those words. The United States was not founded for the greater glory of anything, or as the necessary outcome of history, but for the freedom to collect figurines, to join a clogging troupe, to take a road trip. Yet these words, which carry no ideology whatsoever, are the ones that keep winning. This is the lesson of the past 10 years, and one Osama bin Laden, a man animated by a grandiose vision of restoring a 7th century Muslim empire, never grasped. The most successful organizing principle the world has ever known is a simple guarantee that we can buy and do things that have no point greater than the satisfaction of our own happiness.
Freedom can be defined by the choices we can make for us and our own. No, not the choices that are allowed us, not the choices that are pre-determined, and not the choices others believe are "best for you". Simply put, the "non-purpose" is to be left alone and allowed to be successful and to fail on our own of interests of our own choosing.
Yet, Gary, without explicitly stating such, does not believe it – a lack of trust in his fellow citizens and a trust in bigger government – entirely a Progressive philosophy (which shows Progressivism is not a respecter of the political aisle). It was obvious, even with his long military career for which I heartily thank him for our country, that this was an idea of no consequence. He did not think twice when the idea of Govt restricting even the choice of light bulbs was brought up.
Just take his use of the word "incentive" in describing what RGGI was supposed to do – incentivize electricity providers to pollute less. The problem for me is that yet again, politics is doing a bastardization of a definition; to me, an incentive is a voluntary action offered by an entity to another to achieve either a desired action or that desired action faster. And that offer needs to be voluntarily accepted; it is to be considered a reward. RGGI is neither – it is a Government mandate to participate in its program and a tax is structured if one does not participate "according to what a bureaucrat / elected representative knows is best". In this way, the NH State Senator Gary Lambert, NH State Senator Odell, NH State Senator Jeb Bradley, and NH State Senate President Peter Bragdon are voluntarily continuing to keep the Democrats redefinition of the term as a punishment: do this, or else; we are unwilling to remove this whip from your collective backsides.
I also was unhappy with State Senator Lambert’s complete lack of care of what the "incentive" did to the actual rate payers; upon reminding him that NH citizens would be paying the tax as companies would see any "carbon tax" as merely the cost of doing business to passed onto the citizens. His response of "don’t care what the companies do afterwards" really gave me a great pause.
*****
I also read this after doing the show yesterday with our interview with NH State Senator Gary Lambert.
As far as the actual thrust of the original post, that Osama bin Laden lost because he didn’t realize the true nature of Americans once aroused from their own purposes, add this Neal Stephenson channeling Japanese Admiral Yamamoto at the beginning of WW II: