Equality or individual liberty A primer to progressivism- history, strategies, rules, and applications. The debate equality or individual liberty:
People often conflate equality with individual liberty, believing the two are congruent or can co-exist, but the two are mutually exclusive. Some mistakenly think equality is inherent in the U.S. constitution and feel a moral obligation to pursue and/or defend it. America’s constitution provides individuals with equal protection and equal opportunity, not equality or equal outcomes. Taking property from one and giving it to another robs individuals of their wealth, freedom, and liberty. Forced acquisition, transfer, is totalitarian and is why all Progressive/Marxist governments end as fascist police states.
Many believe the French and American Revolutions were fought for similar principles. This could not be further from the truth. The French fought for social justice and economic equality while Americans fought for independence and individual liberty. The leaders of the French revolution took the heads of the monarchy and upcoming revolutionaries took the heads of the French revolutionary leaders. Americans fought a war for independence whereas the French had riots and bloodbaths. In the last 230 years Americans have thrived under free markets and individual liberty while the French government has failed many times, suffering under a socialist government and economy. Progressive tactics and ideology liken to the French revolution.
Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, defines liberty as a peaceable, voluntary exchange without interference by others. Williams claims this voluntary exchange is a recent phenomenon in America, that the norm throughout most of mankind was arbitrary abuse and control by others. Before capitalism, the free market system, the road to riches was through plunder and the enslavement of our fellow man. With the free market system, the road to enrichment is pleasing our fellow man. Adam Smith’s capitalism was based on the principle that the exchange of the products of one’s best efforts for the products of another’s best efforts required people to act virtuously.
Free markets create new wealth and opportunity while Progressivism/Marxism redistributes limited finite resources. Progressivism/Marxism is a finite system that destroys the free market initiative through redistribution. Capitalism, free markets, are structured to peacefully meet the needs of each individual while socialism promotes malcontent and violence. The famous economist Milton Friedman said: “Those people who put equality before liberty are not likely to have much of either. Those people that put liberty before equality are likely to have a large measure of both.” Williams says there is a temptation among all human beings to live at the expense of somebody else (e.g., farmer, businessman wanting subsidies, poor person wanting welfare, healthcare). If someone held a gun to your head to take your property, they would go to jail. But if someone lobbies Washington to pass a law to take your property, it is called compassion and legalized. Sighting UC Berkeley as an example, Williams says that we are losing our liberty and free speech. Ronald Reagan said: “Every time Congress meets; we lose a little bit of our liberty.”
Progressives constantly tout numerous inequities, then demand government intervention. Free markets are blind to inequities and foster equality. People of all ethnicities and/or economic strata may have a hand in a product’s development before it is acquired by the consumer. Some income inequalities can be attributed to people who have found better ways to please their fellow man more than others (e.g., Bill Gates’ Microsoft.) Government intervention, with the creation of occupational license laws, causes other inequities. For example, A NYC taxi medallion cost $700K, which denies thousands of people the freedom to engage in the taxi business while making the individuals in government who oversee the redistribution rich.
Williams says the only kind of equality that is consistent with liberty is equality before the law, that any other equality is inconsistent with liberty. To save our nation from the same destruction that has occurred in other great societies, we need to start teaching the moral superiority of limited government and personal liberty. According to the Independence Institute, because of capitalism, half the world’s population has risen to middle class status, most people over 15 are literate, air is cleaner, sanitation is rising, and homicide has fallen to its lowest level in recorded history. However, under Marxism, everyone is equally oppressed, or as Churchill said, equally miserable.
The Founding Fathers believed that individuals have inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that these rights are endowed by their creator and precede government. For this reason, they structured the constitution to protect the inalienable rights of individuals and minorities. Contrary to progressive beliefs, the government cannot bestow additional inalienable rights or take inalienable rights without just cause. The purpose of our government is to secure those individual sovereign rights, not to provide social justice (e.g., healthcare, income equality, education, etc.).
James Madison warned about the tyranny of the majority, yet the Progressives eagerly push toward a majority rule. To avoid becoming a raw democracy or a mob, our form of government, as established by the U.S. Constitution, is a republic. It is designed to prevent a tyranny of one (a despot,) a few (an oligarchy) or a majority (a mob). The Constitution is structured so every individual is sovereign but has no just authority. The majority is a just majority that protects but cannot deprive an individual and/or the minority of their sovereign rights: the 51%-majority cannot take the rights of the 49%-minority.
Progressives pretend to embrace the Constitution while they are abolishing it (e.g., electoral college, free speech, free markets, gun laws, citizenship, etc.) Progressivism innately needs to void and/or redistribute our sovereign rights which the Founders would consider injustice or unjust law. The Progressive Movement is inherently anti-American and must shed the constitutional constraints of government to implement what they believe to be the righteous works of modern-day social sciences. They believe that constitutional constraints are standing in the way of implementing their utopia and their century-long academic genius. Progressives believe that they need to rid the country of the constraints of the constitutional structure, the notion of enumerated powers and the idea that the federal government can only exercise the powers delegated to it.
Progressive judges claim that they have been ordained to redefine the Constitution, that the Constitution is whatever they interpret it to be (e.g., N. California U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tiger). When necessary, they impute new language into the Constitution, assigning it new meaning (e.g., when considering abortion laws, life now means privacy).Dr. John C. Eastman, one of the leading U.S. constitutional authorities, believes that people are tiring of unelected judges controlling their lives and policy decisions to the point that we are no longer allowed to govern ourselves (e.g., building a wall, ending sanctuary cities, DACA, asylum, etc.). He also believes, unlike progressives that advocate for activist judges, that Trump is not trying to put conservatives or liberals on the court, but constitutionalists – judges that follow the law to where it leads and enforce a higher law rather than try to make law.
John Marini, author of “Unmasking the Administrative State,” claims the “administrative state” is the government established bureaucracy. Marini believes elected officials have relinquished their authority to bureaucrats who relieve them of making political decisions on things such as law. Laws are no longer deliberated; they are now made by so called experts that are usually recruited from progressive universities. Decisions that used to be made in civil society by “political rule” are now in the hands of the bureaucrat’s “rational rule”. Supposedly, their authority is established by the “rational knowledge” of the social and hard sciences of university disciplines. Our bureaucracies have become extensions of progressive universities. To thrive, bureaucracies need to expand and devour our form of constitutional government that benefits the progressive totalitarian state. These so-called experts of “rational knowledge” are replacing our civil society’s “political rule”, our principled human decision-making process, with “rational rule”. Progressive bureaucratic agencies grew under Franklin D. Roosevelt but mushroomed under Linden B. Johnson’s progressive “Great Society”.
Citizens have become spectators of their own political process, unaware of the governmental procedures that no longer represent the people but rather factions of special interest (e.g., Chamber of Commerce, AFL-CIO, etc.) Instead of a localized, decentralized, representative government, citizens now have a distant, centralized, unrepresentative, Washington D.C.-based government. Washington D.C. and it’s ruling class are now synonymous to the 1700’s golden streets of Versailles and its snuff-sniffing ruling elite prior to the French revolution. As “rational rule” expands over “political rule” it expands the progressive ruling class, their bureaucracies, and the progressive totalitarian government. People have become unaware of their own sovereignty and their decision making has been turned over to people that are unelected and unaccountable. The French philosopher Tocqueville, in his 1835 work “Democracy in America”, said: “centralized administrations is the form of despotism that democratic societies are going to have to fear”. Marini claims that the progressive administrative state is democratic tyranny.
Conservative writer Mark Levin believes that the purpose of the progressive’s massive 4th branch of government is to use the bureaucracy and unelected judges to resist the opposition party when they’re elected, and to support the popular vote and expand the bureaucracy when they get elected. It is heads they when, tails you lose philosophy. Levin believes Trump’s “political rule” is breaking the stranglehold of the progressive’s bureaucratic “rational rule” (e.g., global corporate elite, special interest, media, RINOs, etc.); that looking out for the interest of the people and the county’s welfare, instead of the progressive’s ruling class welfare, draws incoming wrath and ire from the progressive establishment.
For example, Trump’s efforts to put economic restraints on China, Russia, and Iran to prevent their aggression, atrocities and war is resisted by the global corporate establishment. Part of the establishment’s resistance strategy is to enlist both their current and former puppet politicians and bureaucrats, the future global corporate elites. For profit, Britain’s former Prime minister David Cameron has joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative that is consuming poorer nations and forcing western nations to have an unhealthy reliance on China’s policies and technology. The Russian pipeline to Germany, Nord Stream, was set up by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and authorized by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This strengthens the Russian economy, their military capabilities, Germany’s reliance on Russian energy, while the U.S. pays to defend Germany against Russian aggression. To continue trading illicitly with Iran European companies have developed a financial system, INSTEX, to circumvent U.S. banking. French President Macron supports this circumvention so Atos Information Technology, a company acquisitioned by his former bank partners, Rothschild & Cie Banque, can continue selling information technologies to Iran. This costs the U.S. militarily in blood and treasure while Iran spreads terrorism throughout Europe and the Middle East. For profit the NBA and Wall Street align themselves with China’s human atrocities against Western interests while they take the moral high ground and rail against Trump on issues such as transgender, immigration, race, etc.
Progressives constantly try to project their ideology onto the right by comparing conservatives to Hitler and Mussolini. The fact is the conservative right champions the other end of the spectrum: individual rights and liberty. Our republic was founded on the principle that individual rights should not be sacrificed for the collective good. Sacrificing individual rights for the collective good, or “general will”, is the Progressive/Marxist ideology. Progressives/Marxists believe that all rights are subject to the state (e.g., men as communities are supreme over men as individuals, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.)
Hitler was a National Socialist, Lenin’s communism was Marxists and Mussolini was a Fascist. Socialism, Marxism and Fascism are the core beliefs of the present-day anti-capitalist Progressive movement as evidenced by the ideologies of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth warren, Nancy Pelosi, The Squad, and others on the left. The Progressive movement is comprised of Marxist, Socialist, Fascist and Communist organizations (e.g., Antifa, Black lives Matters, la Raza, Moveon.org, Occupy Wall Street, SEIU, Socialist Worker, Voice of Revolution, etc.) Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto is literally the doctrine of collectivism, the progressive ideology. Throughout history, collectivism has only proven to benefit the ruling class social elite, Venezuela being its latest victim.
Communism takes total ownership of party, social class and means of production, whereas Fascism allows ownership, but government representation controls the means of production through national councils. Like Communism, Fascism also advocates for a totalitarian one-party state. For example, blackmailing our country, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tried to hold the $2 trillion CARES Act stimulus bill hostage until she could get her fascist polices enacted. Hiding behind the political correctness of diversity, she tried to insert government-controlled corporate diversity boards, or national councils, as well as Union funds and Union controls into the CARES Act. Diversity boards would completely control the corporate management of salaries, hiring practices of employees, cost, profits and means of production. Corporations would be forced to give the government a complete statistical analysis of their operations on a quarterly basis and be beholding to Nancy and the progressive party. Pelosi also tried to create a totalitarian one-party fascist progressive state by trying to insert nationalized federal election laws into the CARES bill (e.g., early voting, same day voter registration, mail in voting, vote harvesting, etc.) which benefit the progressive party. Nancy has tried to control the presidency, senate, and Judicial branches of government. Now she wants control of our means of production. Nancy frequently boasts about her Italian heritage. Could she be an agent for fascism?
Joel Kotkin, author of “The Human City”, who describes himself as a lifelong liberal, claims the progressive left’s long-term agenda is planning a two-tier society: the ultra-rich class and the peasant class. Kotkin claims the progressives and their global corporate elites are essentially using the communist city planning document to bring back a form of feudalism, that progressives are not about upward mobility anymore. They keep people in place using high taxes, redistribution, regulations, social engineering, etc., making it impossible for the hardworking, blue-collar workers to move up to the middle class. Using climate change to give credence to their plan, they are creating a class of workers that have no expectations, a class with no children, no houses, living in small apartments, in small spaces, with no cars. They talk diversity but impose uniformity.
Americans need to decide if they want to forfeit their individual liberty, their free markets, their free and open society for Progressive/Marxist tyranny. Do they advocate for the progressive establishment, the global corporate elite, who profit from their demise? Do they advocate for the destruction of their culture, constitution, and way of life? Do they advocate for forced acquisitions, transfers of their personal wealth and individual liberty? Do they advocate for the PC global corporate elite’s corrupt puppet politicians to centralize and socially engineer their nation and neighborhoods? Progressives believe that they have been ordained to control what you can think, do, and say, that their politically correct mind control is what is best for them and you. Resist and they will use Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”, the progressive bible, to ridicule, boycott and, if necessary, violently attack you. Regarding Socialism, the following said:
Winston Churchill: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
Vladimir Lenin: “The goal of socialism is communism.”
Ben Franklin, regarding the constitution: “…that the document be administered a number of years until the people reject liberty in favor of tyranny.”
Margaret Thatcher: “Socialist’s cry ‘power to the people’ and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean – power over people, power to the State.”
Voltaire: “In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.”