Posted on 09/02/2017 7:06:31 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
Ping.....
Hegel distinguished between the “state” and “civil society,” but because he was a German (a Prussian) in fact, he used the word “state” (”Staat”) so much that he infected much of the 19th century with something akin to “state worship.” You can find Ward’s articles on Hegel at Google Books.
These are the same doofusses (doofi?) who believe Emma Lazarus’ poem is Federal law.
When you take a big chunk of what we consider to be individual rights and liberties and give them to government, then it makes sense that you’d start to see government and society as the same thing.
Remember we’re dealing with adolescent minds that have reached the age of majority.
If you live in NYC and see where half+- of each paycheck goes it becomes easy to be confused.
Government regulations can create problems - big problems: lack of affordable housing, lack of (affordable) medical care, massively expensive drugs, etc.
Imagine you live on a $1.2 million five-acre estate backing to farmland.
Imagine if your farmer neighbor decided subdivide 10 acres that lovely farmland into a 30-tarpaper shack per acre subdivision.
Many of your new neighbors would have kids.
If you had a public school system it would become vastly overcrowded.
Maybe the new neighbors might have motor vehicles.
They might consider auto insurance a luxury.
Many might also be lousy drivers. One might make a big impression into the back end of your new Mercedes.
Government is Baal, and we must all worship and make sacrifice to it.
"When we say that society does anything we mean of course that it does it according to some settled method of social action. Society of course is an abstraction, but it is one of those abstractions that are always doing something. Society always possesses an organization, and it is this organization that acts. It would be as reasonable to object to the statement that an army does anything. An army is an abstraction in the same sense that society is such. It is an organization capable of doing much, and this is all that is meant by the action or the work of society."
The author of this screed shows a poor mastery of English grammar, as well as a fundamental inability to understand the concepts underlying the words "army" and "society."
An army is not, as he claimed, an abstract concept. It actually has very concrete definitions (depending on the context). Society, on the other hand, is a very nebulous concept. It can be seen as groups of people who have adopted certain customs in order to live harmoniously. The problem I see with so-called socialists is that they have elevated the status of society to that of a super-organism, built up of tiny meaningless cells (that are individual human beings) that have no particular value individually. So they discard any considerations for harmonious co-existence and instead adopt this attitude that anything goes to advance the interests of the super-organism--including killing millions of people that they consider a blight on the super-organism.
Imagine if your farmer neighbor decided subdivide 10 acres that lovely farmland into a 30-tarpaper shack per acre subdivision
Not the business of the Federal Government
Many of your new neighbors would have kids
Not the business of the Federal Government
If you had a public school system it would become vastly overcrowded
Not the business of the Federal Government
Maybe the new neighbors might have motor vehicles
Not the business of the Federal Government
They might consider auto insurance a luxury
Not the business of the Federal Government
Many might also be lousy drivers. One might make a big impression into the back end of your new Mercedes
Not the business of the Federal Government
The natural limit of a US patented drug price is about $10,000/year for sustained treatment or as low as about $1,000 for one-shot treatment.
This is because US citizens could fly overseas and buy pirate copies of patented drugs.
Basically, no company would invest in drugs with a development cost in excess of the natural limit, such as the new ~$475,000/patient Novartis drug:
But if you are a Congressman’s, Senator’s or a President, your only serious personal worries are medical.
Their natural response is to try to save their own lives - which means an artificially propped-up drug pricing system, such as that provided via the PPACA.
“Not the business of the Federal Government”
We are discussing only “government”, without a preceding adjective such as federal.
Progressives don’t believe in the concept of society.
Atomization of the individual is a necessary component of totalitarianism.
They don’t confuse society and government. They see it as necessary that everything social should be determined and regulated by the government, that there should be no distinction between the two.
On that they are not confused.
Because they’ve made them the same. Government can’t regulate speech but they’ve achieved the same thing by their control over society.
Progressive income taxation is a key plank of the Communist Manifesto.
“In 1894...The federal income tax was strongly favored in the South, and it was moderately supported in the eastern North Central states, but it was strongly opposed in the Far West and the Northeastern States (with the exception of New Jersey).”
“On July 12, 1909, the resolution proposing the Sixteenth Amendment was passed by the Congress and was submitted to the state legislatures. Support for the income tax was strongest in the western and southern states and opposition was strongest in the northeastern states. Supporters of the income tax believed that it would be a much better method of gathering revenue than tariffs, which were the primary source of revenue at the time. From well before 1894, Democrats, Progressives, Populists and other left-oriented parties argued that tariffs disproportionately affected the poor, interfered with prices, were unpredictable, and were an intrinsically limited source of revenue.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
In 1913, the leftists got their way. You’ve got to pay.
My hope is to have the ratification votes of some states declared to be equal protection violations of Amendment XIV.
One year after ratification, World War I broke out in Europe.
That war made it impractical to export goods in large quantities at lower tariffs to the US.
The income tax deal for cheap goods backfired badly.
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