Steve’s post on NH Exceptionalism posted up right after our GrokTALK! show this past Saturday – and I really liked it! To me, the money graph was this:
In a corner of America where co-dependence with government is the prescription of choice, the Granite state rejected it on an epic scale.
But it also got me thinking – is that all? Is that’s all that it is, a rejection of dependency on Government? I think not.
Oh sure, there are some that believe that there is nothing to be called Exceptionalism, that it is merely a matter of luck and geography. Simply, we all were and are fortunate simply by birth and location – nothing less, but nothing more. They see so much wrong in our history, their dislike the current state of society, and their outlook is so dim – they cannot fathom or stand that life is not completely "equitable" for all. They realize not, in their striving for that "equality for all", that they have gone past ‘equality of the law’ but to "commonness in outcome". In other words, they strive for the lowest common denominator. In their headlong rush to provide their "freedom from" for the "oppressed", they don’t understand (or care) that in deliberately taking from some to give to others, they have become inured to the fact that they themselves have become the oppressors even as they see themselves as liberators and saviors.
Our Founders made much of idea of personal liberties and designed a system of governance that was designed to enhance those freedoms above the needs of the State. After all, they had decided that the heavy hand of the English Monarchy was far to much to bear – in order to reap the rewards of that Liberty, the only alternative was less government overall and that each individual citizen would have more of a say of how such a new governance would work. They toiled over each word, the nuances that were built up by each phrase, all with the end result of constraining that Government that would result. They surely understood that Government was a necessity; but in the histories that they read, they compared the best of each of those political systems in those historical accounts and tried to take the best of each AND provide checks and balances against even the best features.
Their crowning genius was not just determining that series of checks and balances that resulted in both the US and NH Constitutions, but in this one eternal fact:
Men will always be men.
Unlike the current crop of socialistic Progressives that believe that mankind can evolve to their standards if only channeled correctly and by the right people to a "higher plane", the Founders realized that those that would seek such control ARE the problem and tried to prevent that. Over and over again, they bumped into historical examples of "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", and that while the times may change, while the situations may change, the innate fallen spirit of man, when confronted with the wielding of power, suffuses them with the call to acquire more power.
A most simple truth. Most, once obtaining that desired power, will lust for more. Not always in large amounts all at once, but as with many Administrative States, simply proceeding step by step ESPECIALLY if not confronted, admonished, and vanquished. And that is exactly what has happened here in NH. But there was, as we have seen the last two years, that headlong rushes to "fundamentally change" society, the intermixing of Society and Government, the replacement of personal charity with governmental funding of services. A limited government grown to Leviathan dimensions and that growth seemingly without end.
Steve adds these questions:
