A View From The Moral Highground

Via HotAir, the folks at Reason took to the Rally to Restore Sanity and fielded thoughts and responses from a few participants.

It is always tempting to think everyone else is immoderate and unreasonable, the only centered and reasonable worldview being your own.  All concomitant policies are, by default, the only ones worthy of consideration and those of "the other side" not worthy of consideration, let alone discussion.  This tendency seems to fuel the outlook of the Left.

As Joseph Schumpeter noted about disciples of "the prophet Marx" and their academic and intellectual adherents, dissent from and opposition to unproved socialist dogma is not just an error, it is a sin.  Opposition is not wrong intellectually; it is heresy and morally reprehesible.   (See first footnote in chapter one, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy)

Most telling are the responses between 2:33 and 4:14.

Meet Bill Whittle

Meet Bill Whittle from The Firewall.  He looks a bit like Jim Carey, talks like an understudy of Hayek.  Excellent!

Whittle presents the fundamentals of freedom-based conservatism, or what we more broadly call classical liberalism, in plain language and with historical perspective.   His presentations are well worth taking in and passing along.

"There's only one really progressive idea. And that is the idea of legally limiting the power of the government." 


Watch for his videos on Youtube.

Video: What Elitism Does to Freedom

This video by Bill Whittle is worthy of much time and consideration.  I first saw it posted at Hot Air and very much wanted to share here in In Real Time.

No matter what the time, country, or culture, there will always be a group of people who think they know best how to run you life than you do.  Worse still, they are bent on leveraging their elitism upon you through whatever system of government, all at the cost of individual freedom.

Whittle's observations dovetail wonderfully with Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Sowell's
The Vision of The Annointed.

Video: A Great Divide or An Awakening?

At 1:18 it is remarked how Americans disapprove of both political parties. Other polling shows that a majority of Americans think the government is too big and intrusive.

There are ideological divides in the country, as there are in societies free enough to allow divergent public discourse on what is good and just.  The divide that is widening in America is between Americans outside the Beltway grounded in the reality of unsustainable debt, and politicians inside the Beltway who create for themselves their own universe of make-believe economics and math.

Madison famously quipped that "If men were angels, no government would be necessary..." (Federalist 51).  If politicians exercised common sense, no Tea Party would be necessary.