Van Jones

As I posted here, I purchased a copy of Van Jones’ new book and had it signed by Van himself.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a shot to start reading it.  Until today.

There’s been a lot of stuff going on, both in my blogging life as well as in the life outside of the laptop (little as it might be) and I just needed to switch gears for a bit.  So, I started to read some of the books that have been sitting on the shelf for a while – and realized how much I’ve missed holding a book in my hands!  So I as said earlier, it was time to read this book by one of the biggest cheerleaders for a “government centered life” for us all – and basically, someone who has no problem in slagging folks like TEA Partier me.  After all, I’m not someone who studied Marx as a political way to follow and have little truck with Communitarianism – a word that you’ll be seeing more often here on the ‘Grok.  Essentially, the emphasis is on “the community” and while the Wiki definition makes it seem benign, read the section on Positive Rights:

Central to the communitarian philosophy is the concept of positive rights, which are rights or guarantees to certain things. These may include state subsidized education, state subsidized housing, a safe and clean environment, universal health care, and even the right to a job with the concomitant obligation of the government or individuals to provide one. To this end, communitarians generally support social security programs, public works programs, and laws limiting such things as pollution.

A common objection is that by providing such rights, communitarians violate the negative rights of the citizens; rights to not have something done for you. For example, taxation to pay for such programs as described above dispossesses individuals of property. Proponents of positive rights, by attributing the protection of negative rights to the society rather than the government, respond that individuals would not have any rights in the absence of societies—a central tenet of communitarianism—and thus have a personal responsibility to give something back to it.

I digress in a small part -but make no mistake in that in many cases, the emphasis is always that the individual Rights must be subsumed to the need of the Collective.  With these watermelon environmentalists, there will be more and more emphasis that we need to give up stuff and Rights “for the common good” – at and by their command.  The problem is that ” the needs for the Common Good”, just like the vaunted “social contract” that Leftists accuse Conservatives of violating, there is never a sheet of paper that lay out what the “Common Good”‘s needs are, or the boundaries vis-a-vis our Individual rights.  All there is seems to be a never ending, vaporous commentary of “we more, you less”.  How do you defend yourself against what is basically vaporware?  (er, easy: start asking them the hard questions of “what?”, starting writing them down, and don’t take “no” when they say “er, later – we have to go over this other stuff” or “I’ll get back to you”.

Thus, this fits in both with Van Jones as an environmentalist and with the Granite State Future Plan / Sustainable Communities Initiative posts I’ve been putting up lately. So, back to the review – I haven’t even made it to Chapter 1 yet – the Prologue is 35 pages long.  In it, two things struck me:

• He shoulda listen harder to his Dad; he comes around to believe him but missed the most important point
• He lies

About what?  “Of course, President Obma had no intention of closing America’s coal mines.” (page xxvii).  Just one big lie through that nice big smile he has!

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