Looming Red

I often tell people that I am a consequentialist rather than a conservative. This is not to shy away from Burkean Conservatism, but rather to be more descriptive of what I am trying to conserve. I am a Conservative, a very ardent one. My only argument against Burkean conservatism would be that one cannot be Burkean with socialism because it is the oposite of Republicanism. So, I have to go further than the generic conservative label, that can be understood by anyone to be any and everything.

Were the label of liberal, in the Madisonian tradition, not so mutated to mean its opposite, I would be conservative, conserving classical american liberalism. The label has been long-destroyed by subversive, mal-contents, to where we must bid it adeu. The next label I want to use is Libertarian, because it was originally a replacement for the lost label of liberal. Yet again, I cannot use it, because it has also been captured by reformed leftists, who have come from the dark fiscal side, while holding onto their social permissivism. So much of libertarianism is really just repackaged objectivism which I object to. So, what do I have left?

I come from the direction that the label, at that moment of pinning it on yourself, should be a teaching moment. Conservative is too general to help with this. So, again, what do I call myself? I will not start with hyphenated conservatism, because it implies that there is something that must be modified about conservatism when that is not the case. For instance, one need not attach compassionate to conservative, since letting people hold on to their freedom and inspiring them to make something of themselves is more compassionate than any alternative. So, I am a consequentialist when I am being conservative. That is that best, most descriptive label.

People are born free. They must choose for themselves and between themselves without interference by a third party who cannot point to a direct interest. If I have dealings with a restaurant, a car manufacturer, etc. that do not concern anyone else because it is my life and my money that is doing the dealing, then no one may insert themselves in the middle of this deal to “protect me”. If I a make a bad deal, then I will accept the consequence. I am of sound mind and I am an adult.

This is conservative in the Burkean sense, because history and the civil society tell me what it means to be of “sound mind”. The culture, created over the eons of man’s dealing with man are rules and definitions that are only codified into law after the civil society creates the underlying culture of the laws. The reason, that a conservative must be a social one is that societies are build socially. A conservative smells the foul oder of social subversion a mile off without having to define why, because of the civil society that has taught the conservative.

For me, unfortunately “you’ll know it when you see it” is not enough of a label to fight socialist subversion. You must counter the subversion, because it is aimed at muddying the culture that creates civil societies. Every moment must be a teachable one to counter the muddied culture. I am a conservative and that means consequentialism.

Consequentialism is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, because it’s authors made only reference to natural law, knowing that they were going against the written laws. Those natural laws that were trampled, were consequentialist laws. The king could not simply insert himself into the lives of free men, he needed their representation to do anything with and to them, but also, no matter how much submission he would get from representatives, there were lines that could not be crossed no matter what. All of those lines were consequentialist lines. So many times, people will confuse the montra of “no taxation without representation” as being what the declaration was about. This is just not true, it was about the liberation of individual sovereignty from the state, which is a consequentialist argument in the sense that individual sovereignty is derived from the freedom to deal without interference of third parties.

The constitution is also consequentialist in that it enumerates powers agreed to and reserves the rest of the powers to individuals. The constitution does not grant to the state anymore than individuals granted to it on the day of its ratification. In a says, the constitution is a statement of those powers that relinquished by individuals whom were all free to do so. These enumerated powers relinquished unto the federal government by the individuals whom did so by their natural sovereignty represent a barrier that, when breached, is an intrusion of the sovereign minority of one. State constitutions are this way as well.

If I am a free-roaming creature on the plains of Earth, encountered by others, anything taken from me without my consent through consequentialist dealing is an act of agression. That I am powerless to overcome the agression is no disqualifier that it is still agression. Mandating anything on me where I do not impose my will on others, even if it is seen to be in my best interest, is as much an act of agression as two people taking from one by force.

I am a consequentialist, because I recognize force can only be applied where parties are directly effecting others by their dealings whom have not been involved in the dealings. I am consequentialist, but from now on, maybe I will just say I am a conservative to help the brand be understood as the consequentialism that it must be.

Whenever a conservative person converses with leftists or left leaning people about the reasoning for being conservative, the discussion will possibly lead to all kinds of silly things like wanting to return to the days of slavery or racial separation. In conversations regarding the constitution and constitutionalism this will usually come up. The constitution is said to have supported the racist and evil institutions that were thrown off with much effort. All of this reasoning represents an uninformed view of the constitution that must be disputed.

You can hear this argument carry out between John Stossel and Charlie Rengel, where the conversation ended with, “Hey, the constitution only made me 3/5 of a guy.” Ask the person to show the codification of slavery in the constitution further than that, they will not be able to and they will not try to. It is a week position that must have terminal argumentation to back it up, or in other words arguments designed to close argument. In the Rengel example, he pulls out the trump card that he thought Stossel would back away from as though it were a landmine. If Stossel continued to argue the actual origin of the 3/5 clause and why it was in the constitution and how the constitution actually had written within it the demise of the overseas slave-trade, then he would have stepped on the landmine. It is much easier for listeners to understand that 3/5 means not whole than to get that same listener to understand that it was the slavery supporter’s position to count slaves as whole rather than not at all as the abolitionists wanted the constitution to reflect the reality of a slave in the south.

This nature of terminal arguments is why leftists rely on them so much. How often will you hear a conservative end an argument with sweeping accusations of racism or that the constitution established racism? Essentially, these kinds of terminal arguments put the conservative in the position of holding ground against a slowly slipping tug-of-war. This kind of argument puts the conservative in a position of being for the small, shriveled thing while the other side continues to call itself progressive. Holding ground is losing ground. Conservatives must define what it is that they are conserving in order to take ground rather than slowly concede it.

“What are you trying to conserve?” must be the question that is constantly answered. The answer to that question is Individual Liberty, Constitutional Enumeration of Power, State Sovereignty, Civil Society, and all those things that can be called the Virtue of the republic.

Charles Montesquieu talked of Virtue as the sustanance of the Republic. Without virtue citizens become like slaves who must make every argument for each morsel of license from the ever, now, mutating Republic. The people will “riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the power of a few, and the licence of many”. The evidence of this rioting on spoils can be heard by the virtue-less citizen who calls for undefined Obama-money. The strength of the controlling few is evident in the ever-expanding bureaucracies who control more and more of the lives of the many.

The virtue of a Republic is derived from religious virtue, those things that could be called Judeo-Christian values in the case of the American Republic, but though they are derived from religious values, Republican Virtue is a separate set from religious virtues. Where the religious virtue of respecting property holds one blameless before god, the republican virtue of the same sustains the republic. Where the religious virtues of self-reliance and individual charity one to another make moral imperfect people before god, the republican virtues of the same sustain the republic.

What are you trying to conserve? Without the enumeration of powers in the constitution, states become nothing more than regional administrations and individual rights become dispensations of those who would be our betters rather than our equals.

What are you trying to conserve? Without personal property, the hours of a person’s life are owned by others who may confiscate the value of those hours at will—that person is a slave and a cog in a system that owns his time.

What are we trying to conserve? If you take from one and give to another the natural consequences of choices are ignored and allowed to build until they bring down the whole.

Where a leftist will give terminal arguments, the conservative must give reason and discussion. If you pile on reason and discussion, the piling terminal arguments are made transparent and the leftist loses credibility and the conservative wins the argument.

In this Heritage Center speech by Evan Sayet, comedian, commentator, and former writer for Politically Incorrect with Bill Mayr, the concept of Liberalism (with a capital “L”) not being liberal at all is well covered. It is not about the liberation of individual sovereignty from the coercion of the state. The Progressive-Liberalism movement is merely a permissivism movement. It is neither liberal, nor progressive.

Evan Sayet calls modern Liberalism “a cult of indiscriminateness” or in other words a movement surrounding the concept that everything classically moral is immoral. He says that this comes from a core belief in the systemization of discrimination by former generations, making all moral standards immoral on the grounds that they could only have been arrived at by discrimination against behavior, belief, or difference. So, the only standard to judge something immoral is whether it has any legacy tradition.

Thus, in the 60′s you got, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Anyone over 30 is set in the old ways. John Lennin’s song, Imagine, comes straight out of this core belief. If there is nothing like a heaven, nations, religion, and all the people are living for today then there can be no moral codes that come from discrimination. What do you have to fight for if you have nothing to believe in. There is no wrong or right, because you can only arrive at wrong and right declarations through discrimination. And the only way that one can be discriminate is if one has beliefs. If you don’t believe in anything, then you don’t discriminate against anything.

The reason that an ideology as objectively condemnable as socialism and communism or actually marxism will not be condemned by a left that witnessed with the rest of us Tiananmen Square, gulag prison camps, Stalinist show trials, and the Berlin Wall is that what is immoral to us in the west is only immoral because of some unfairness from the west inspired by discrimination. To accept condemnation of the obviously objectionable evils of the world is simply to concede to the discrimination of our society. Terrorists only terrorize because of what we did to them. Cuba only communized because of the capitalist tourism that took advantage of their island. Abortion is moral because it gives power to the woman who is disadvantaged by sexist society. There is no ambiguity in a feminist who is against the war in Afghanistan.

This speech finally put a voice to the one thing I have been trying to identify about the left. They are permissivists not liberals, that is true, but it is that they belong the cult of indiscriminateness that makes indiscriminately permissive. This means, in a constitutionally defined small federal government nation like ours, they can but only be for the opposite of statist centralized government. That is why “Yes We Can” chanted by millions does not invoke even the slightest irony that it had nothing to do with what those chanters could do but what a handful would do to further state control with government takeovers of private companies, the co-option of the healthcare industry, and nationalization of the banking industry.

There is an outlandishly ridiculous documentary that is taking the world by storm. Wait, I actually had that wrong. It is going totally unnoticed by everyone.

Sure there was media about some of their pranks that they pull, one of which caught some attention when they impersonated the US Chamber of Commerce to announce support for legislation on global warming. This is just about the extent of their fame.

They are like the Jerky Boys of political activism, scheduling fake press conferences and conventions in the name of organizations they have judged to be worthy of their ridicule. Of course the only evil they ever see is stereo-typically corporate evil. One of their big pranks is to impersonate an insurance company giving a lecture on the benefit of “golden skeletons” in the closet. Their hidden cameras only get a fairly mild reaction out of one person praising the lecture. In this meeting of evil corporate types, most of the reactions are from skepticism to contempt for the lecture topic.

This whole documentary is more about these two loser comedians and what lengths they will go to make fools out of themselves. It’s more like a comedy central audition tape than a documentary.

The only part that really got my eyr more than my pity was a part where they try to trace back the “corporate greed” to economist Milton Friedman. I can understand leftists not agreeing with Milton Friedman, but they can never be honest about their disagreement. Friedman was a true liberal, in a classical scottish enlightenment sense. He was a disciple of Adam Smith and believed that greater economic freedom is true freedom. If these two, and other leftists for that matter, were honest they would admit that their disdain for Friedman is that he argued against the state.

In their introduction to Friedman and why they don’t like him, they show two images that represent freedom. One is an African descended slave breaking shackles from his wrists in an arch over his head. The other, representing Friedman’s brand of freedom, is a person in a suit being showered with money. This is the part where these two mildly humorous comedians took on more of a doltish quality.

What is it that made the slave in the first photo not free prior to breaking his shackles? The slave was said to be owned by another person, true. The slave could not travel, marry, or do anything else that the master would not want. But for what purpose? The slave master wanted the slave’s labor without having to pay him or give him any other freedom that would inconvenience the master.

Who is the more common modern slave? and why is he or she not free? If a person has the product of his labor confiscated by manipulative taxation, taxation that will only be alleviated if “proper” behaviors are exhibited, is that person free? If the receipt of the product your labor is withheld from you and goes to another to whom it does not rightfully belong except through the power of the state to tax and coerce compliance, are you not a slave with bronze shackles?

The supposed examples of Friedman’s brand of freedom, in the documentary, are companies like IBM that gave technical support to the NAZI government during Hitlers reign. This technical support earned IBM a “golden skeleton” in their closet, because even though Jews were murdered with their corporate help, they got a lot of money for it. This is where most leftists often get confused.

The NAZI government was merely another off-shoot of Marxism. NAtional ZIosialisten is the full abbreviated name of the NA.ZI. party. They believed that government control of private industry could only be attained, first, by destruction of the maligned middlemen jewish minority and second, by the consolidation of the private industry through regulation and unionization.

They were roughly following “Il Doulche” Benito Mussolini, who believed that communism, while having good and praiseworthy goals of destroying corporate power and subduing the masses, was fundamentally flawed in its approach of trying to own directly the means of production on an international scale. Mussolini received great praise by contemporary progressives during the 20’s and early 30’s for his belief that the same socialist goals could be achieved on a national rather than international scale through government control rather than ownership of the means of production.

That Friedman could be pointed to as an example of big business greed is pure stupidity and/or ignorance. First of all, Friedman disliked large companies like IBM and believed that diverse small business was the preferred result of diverse individual economic freedom. The proof that he was right is in a simple thought experiment.

When government regulates the Vaccine industry to use certain equipment, perform certain types of studies, etc, etc, who is it that can produce with such obstacles? Will it be small chemistry labs with big ideas and slim wallets or will it be politically connected fat cats who will hire for a pittance the big idea chemist with the large corporate legacy wealth? The greater the regulation, the bigger legal compliance departments, the more expensive the production, the bigger the corporation needed to bring e vaccine to market.

Milton Friedman understood the power of the free market to be better way in that instance, because the loss part of the profit and loss free market would discipline the big idea chemist to make a vaccine that did not harm the customer. This is the famous invisible hand at work in the economy of private individuals freely dealing with one another. To represent this with an image of suited man being showered with money is sophistry or stupidity and given who we are talking about, it is probably the latter.

Take the present economy created by the mortgage crisis. The Yes Men would have us believe that it was corporate greed that got us into this mess and only regulation can save us. It may have been corporate greed, but it was also government and political greed. Prior to 2001 there was no such thing as greed, right? Greed is just this recent innovation that we must regulate away.

Obviously, to say that greed is some new innovation is a purposefully absurd point, but it points out the absurdity of the argument that the present circumstance was because of greed. Thomas Sowell, another Hoover institute fellow of Milton Friedman, who has carried the banner for free markets since Friedman’s passing, is fond of making the point that a person could be the greediest person in the world without adding to his fortune another dime. Why? That person needs a vehicle for his greed to benefit him.

The Housing Boom and Bust a bestselling book by professor Sowell points out that government regulation gave the greed of speculators and lenders a vehicle that a free market would not have done. Another thought experiment: if I lend money to people who cannot pay me back over and over again, am I stupid or greedy? What will be the penalty of doing this? In a natural free market scenario that is stupid and will carry the penalty that I would not be in the lending business for long since I will lose all of my seed money, as I should.

When the government charters companies to take the risk off my hands so I only get profit and no loss then coerces me through government fiat to lend to exactly those types of people who can’t afford to pay it back, am I stupid or greedy? Well, probably greedy, but not stupid. I would have been doing exactly what was beneficial for me to do with a broken profit and loss system. When there is loss in the profit and loss system, which Milton Friedman was fond of pointing out, it is exactly those kinds of people who would stop at nothing to make a buck at anther’s expense who lose their power.

I say “lose their power”, because most of us forget why we call it the scottish enlightenment. From what were the scottish academies enlightened? They were part of the emergence from the serfdom of Europe.

It was the Lord who thought the peasant class had not enough sense to manage affairs. The Lords set themselves up as the enlightened and through force coerced the masses tho comply. They set prices, negotiated pay, dictated benefits or work, and on and on. Yes the peasants were ignorant, but they were kept ignorant by the laws and the situation laid down by the Lords. If you were a peasant who did not comply or even just excelled in your production, the Lord would, under authority of a king or queen, confiscate, punish, execute.

It was another Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek, who believed that the more economies move away from a free profit and loss model the more we are on a similar “Road to Serfdom” as he named a very famous book on the subject. With regulation and well-positioned big business using corrupt governments to help kill off their weaker, less-connected competition, how is Hayek wrong? He wasn’t wrong at all.

Go back and read the above paragraphs where I talked about life prior to the Scottish enlightenment and prior to the destruction of feudalism. How much of it parallels or modern society. The “kings” are the elected officials who are empowered by the ignorant masses to create bureaucracies to regulate. The “lords” are the various bureaucratic institutions empowered by the politicians to penalize, manipulate, and dominate those not politically connected. Who are the serfs? We are.

So why do the Yes Men get my ayr so much? Well it is really not them. They are just useful idiots. They really are about as intellectual as the mushrooms with which they recreate. It is the ignorance that gets me angry. Why is it that freedom is the one that is getting such hatred aimed at it by people like the Yes Men? Freedom is the only way out of the serfdom we have all allowed to become our lives.

Turn on any TV show that has some interaction with public sector employed characters and you will get a narrative of shrinking public sector budgets leading to financially strangled public sector employees. Two episodes in a row of the SyFy show “Warehouse 13″ have characters employed in the public sector who bring up budget cutbacks. This TV show is not unusual in this depiction as it is very common to hear the narrative.

Specifically in the world of public education, media narratives of financially smitten educators abound. Congress comes back from recess for emergency funding to support the budgets of locally run districts. The president gives speech after speech with backdrops of teachers in an effort to get wide support for the plight of the starved teachers.

Many states and school districts have managed their affairs into the toilet. As a result of that and the economic environment, money for the public schools is said to be tight. You and I can, through our local school boards, attempt to fix our local problems, but we cannot effect one bit the decisions of some far off locally run education system. Yet, the argument from the president and other socialists is that we must pay for those far off districts and boards none the less.

Obama says that our kids will not get the education that they desperately need, because the sainted teachers will not have the money to come back and teach this year. Our kids will suffer without an education. In the spirit of this gushers and bailouts presidency and congress, we must give whatever our hopes are for our money to pay for the aims and designs on our money for the teachers and their unions. This is nothing but another bailout for those communities that have screwed themselves over with bad management on the backs of those who haven’t.

What is the point?

The national debt, contributed to by this bailout mentality is climbing and climbing. The deficit is rising. The private sector is shrinking. The government mentality is to consume and consume the surplus and non-surplus of the private sector and put off the payment to an undefined later date. Well who is going to pay later?

The debt and deficit will be reconciled by higher taxes and inflated-away savings values. Those are the only two ways this can be resolved. Unless there is an epidemic that kills off the current working generations, the current working generations will pay in shrunken retirements and shrunken pay before they retire. Still, they are not the only ones that will have to pay. The ones that will supposedly suffer by the lack of teachers are the ones who will pay later for debt today.

Anyone who has lived in a country with runaway inflation can tell you of the value of an education in such an environment. Yes, you may have a slightly larger edge over those who don’t have an education, but it is an edge that makes you king of the trash heap. Education in a hyper-inflation environment has very little effect on your ability to raise yourself out of poverty. There are no examples in history where people in mass could do anything but leave their country or revolt  to change their personal situations in mass when presented with such a circumstance.

So, again, what’s the point? If bailouts like the current one for local education lead to monetary collapse, one cannot raise by any means himself from such a collapse, what is the point of having an education payed for by bailouts?

Imagine that social mobility from incapable and poor to capable and well off is an old-time water wheel. As new water runs down stream past the paddles, the wheel turns. The part of the wheel that was under water is soon the part at the apex of the rotation. When there is freedom in the system, with a stable currency and manageable expenses, each part of the wheel can one day be at its own apex.

The American dream is that from even underwater means, one can rise to his or her own apex. We can be successful with that talent and hard work with which we have been blessed to possess or perform. That mobility it provided by a system with freedom in the rotation of the shaft on which our wheel turns.

When hyper-inflation kicks in, runaway taxation ensues, and the other burdens caused by the bailout mindset become evident, the rotation of our water wheel stops as though a tree branch is thrust in the spokes or the bearings have seized up. No amount of running water can push the wheel. You can work hard, you can work smart, you can educate yourself, but nothing pushes your wheel. You remain underwater. Underwater becomes your apex.

So, what is the point of bailing out education systems that will educate for a future where education does nothing to push your wheel? We might as well all be illiterate in the rice fields.

The above is a fairly lengthy but enlightening, uplifting, edifying speech by Clarence Thomas on the subject Lincoln, jurist prudence, and slavery.

In this speech Justice Thomas talks about Lincoln’s famous rebuttal of the support of the Kansas-Nebraska act extending slavery to the Louisiana purchase territories. Many people think that Lincoln used the phrase “House divided” in reference to the civil war, but it was well before the civil war and even before he was president.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new–North as well as South.

The battle against slavery that had begun in the very beginning of the federation during the constitutional debates, culminated in the civil war. Then after the civil war, the quest for equal civil rights based on rights culminated in the civil rights movement. In each case, the journey to equalize the house divided took 80 to 100 years.

In the 20th century, the Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR administrations began to divide the house again. We will either become fully socialist as it was called by the progressives of the Wilson era or we will re-liberalize our individual sovereignty back from the state and be fully the nation that we fought for in the revolutionary war.

I fear that Lincoln’s words are prescient for our time as well. On the issue of Marxism in America “I do not expect the Union to be dissolved–I do not expect the house to fall–but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”

Pacifism, by its proper label, is very often an undesirable name. Because it has not been redefined like many of the modern redefined old terms have been, the label of pacifist will be denied by most people who can be defined with no other word. Hilaire Belloc, in his typical fashion of single article poetry, forever explained the absurdity of pacifism in his poem, “The Pacifist”:

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

With such a blunt and precise excoriation, a pacifist must continue to redefine his or herself by other terms. The modern pacifist goes to great lengths to tie his pacifism to religion, political affiliation, intellectual pursuit, or a myriad of other other disguises. Pacifists express many different motivations all covered by an assumption of moral exaltation. Sometimes a pacifist is so because he has interpreted religious text to demand such a position. A pacifist may have had some experience with his own violent tendencies that have caused him to shy away from violence like an alcoholic from Oktoberfest. Perhaps the pacifist is simply a cowardly person who justifies his cowardice with a pacifist philosophy. Still, few dare call it pacifism. It is always some other name.

You will see a person arguing a very pacifist point-of-view in a television debate and take great care to state, “Now listen, I am no pacifist.” This is usually said after the individual has gone on and on about how one must under no circumstances seek military intervention, private gun ownership, capital punishment for the worst offenders, and so on and on. They don’t want the label, but they want the position because it just feels good.

Pacifists generally are people who don’t define themselves in any way. They often people who feel their ways through life. They don’t think beyond the first stage: If I decline to fight, then what? They never answer the “then what?” question. They just want to feel good about how they refuse to hurt someone else.

A pacifist will admit the necessity of some past conflict by which their timidity to hold positions could not be offended. They will refer to a war that popular culture has accepted was necessary, but they will not do so in any other way than 20/20 hindsight.  They do not ever put themselves in the shoes of those who knew at the time that some action needed to be taken. They are pacifists by whatever motivation who relent under the strain of undeniable peer pressure.

This need to justify a pacifist position, however, does much to muddy the water. In a need to deny the term of pacifist, the pacifist will align him or herself with groups who promise pacifist goals, but are usually far from aligned with pacifism. A communist American in the 1950s may have demanded peace, but hoped for communism’s success. An anti-Semite might have called for talks with 1930s German leaders, but just really liked what those guys were saying about Jews. A slave-owner might have spoken of anti-aggression, but really he wanted to retain ownership of his slaves.

This alliance of non-pacifists with pacifists through deceptive rhetoric permeates our contemporary society. Presidential candidates will bloviate on and on about how the oppose war and then pass laws to take property by force of law. They will support dictators abroad, confiscation at home, and generally pursue aggressive action that is far from pacifistic. Since no politician or official will accept the label of pacifist based on rhetoric, the actions never have to be pacifist. They can’t be called a hypocrite, because they accepted no definition for their dogma. It’s just beneficial that their words appealed to the pacifist who padded their victory margins to power.

One of the greatest fallacies of the modern era is to use the term of Liberalism to label those whom we call liberal today. I think that we do this, because they themselves claim the appellation of liberal and we simply concede the use. Those on the other side of issues from “liberals” often convert the term to a pejorative to diminish its positive impact. The loss of this term in its original and historic use within the American tradition has been a loss of understanding of the American Ideal of true classical liberalism.

In the classical sense, Liberalism is the rejection of sovereignty in the state in favor of the concept of individual sovereignty in the people. Up until the liberal period in western society, sovereignty was usually vested in a monarch, parliament, or some other state entity. All individuals within the dominion of the sovereign were nothing more than subjects of the sovereign. Their own natural sovereignty was not recognized or granted to them by the sovereign of the state.

Many philosophers and political thinkers began prior to the liberal era to theorize and later declare that all people were born sovereign and that their sovereignty had been commandeered by those in whom state power was then vested. This radical idea was treasonous in many nations and was only theoretical until a state would arise that would challenge the old notions of vested power. The moment that allowed the theory of liberalism to become practice arrived in an attempt of colonists subject to a distant power to retain liberty that had only been obtained by accident on the part of the host state.

The British crown at the time of the American revolution may have been under the authority of a liberal constitution established in the Cromwell rebellion, but it never gave the people living in the homeland of the empire the kind of individual sovereignty that the colonists enjoyed only through the inability of the crown to restrict them across the Atlantic. When the restrictive power of the crown increased through the expansive influence and power of the growing British empire, the American colonists would not concede the liberty they came to appreciate was theirs.

The declaration of independence and later the constitution named a liberty that had already been part of the American tradition. Subsequent movements of abolitionism of slavery and reconciliation with the native populations with time bore fruit. The journey had been hard and bloody.

Growing along side the expansion of true classical liberalism, modern “liberalism” also grew. It has always been mislabeled, because it has nothing to do with the liberation of individual sovereignty. In fact, the liberal acceptance and experimentation of anything counter to normative culture often pursues expansion of the state in its favor. One can see that liberals so called are neither liberal nor open-minded. They are only counter-cultural and permissive of anything counter-cultural. They are illiberal.

Illiberalism, if further named could be called permissivism. Permissivism is a term that must be used, because it explains it all. If you would like to permit abortion, the left is your ally. Want to have gay marriage, the left is your ally. Activist courts, Czars instead constitutionally reviewed cabinet members, money confiscated from one citizen to give to another, expansive administrative bureaucracies bound by no one and no constitution, indoctrination in schools, state-sponsered healthcare, and on and on. The ideology of permitting anything as long as it is new, expansive, and will solidify your life statement of not being like your parents is the leftist’s ideology.

When Mussolini first became an international political figure, he was celebrated for his new ideas. Socialism was stale and unworkable to many leftists. After all, the government must take over all industry for it to work. The political and logistical implications of such an implementation were seen by many un-constrained permissives as impossible or at least improbably executable. Mussolini’s idea of simply regulating businesses into large corporate entities that would be easier to infiltrate, influence, or bully was so much more practical.

Mussolini himself was a died-in-wool socialist from birth getting even his given name, Benito, from the mexican socialist revolutionary Benito Juarez. Benito Mussolini was lionized in American and western culture for brief time as his ideas were fresh and had not yet been carried to their only conclusions. It was the permissives that called themselves progressives that simply loved these new and unusual ideas.