By Mark Rhoads
Main Steam Media pundits have characterized the debate between President Obama and his critics as a debate over the size and role of government in our lives and that is true as far as it goes. But the problem on the Left goes much deeper. For more than 50 years there has been a robust liberal tradition in America that helped to bring about social reforms in the area of civil rights and other issues.
But somewhere along the line the Left learned the wrong lessons from too much success in using the power of the state as an engine for social reform. So much so that In the last 20, years, the Left has grown increasingly more Left and more radical in its policies so that many leftists now lack any comprhension of the idea that there are any boundaries to the role of government at all. For President Obama, there is no distinction whatsover between government and society because in his view it is all the same thing and there is no area of human activity too personal or private to escape from federal government regulation .
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is unfortunately today one of the least famous of America’s founders but he was one of the most influential writers of 1776. Tom Paine, wrote about the boundary between government and society and the diferent roles of each in his famous pamphlet Common Sense in 1776. His pamphlet sold a half million copies in the 13 colonies just the first year which was an enormous number in that year compared to the literate population of the country. It was one of the key articles that helped to ignite the American Revolution by articulating the cause of liberty and independence from the Crown. I think his 1776 article below still is significant today and is something more conservatives should read and remember:
“SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”
“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer! Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.”
CLICK HERE TO READ ALL OF THIS KEY DOCUMENT OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
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