The Road To Surf-dumb. Or, is it The Road To Serfdom?
"The Road To Surf-dumb ....or is that Serfdom?"
I was a progressive. No longer. Not for at least two decades. I changed when I found out the world does not work like I thought it did. Not even close. Government’s don’t create prosperity. People do. Government’s don’t create freedom. More often than not, they are the very reason there is no freedom. That is far more likely to be true than the reverse. But I only vaguely knew this, just like I had no real idea how an economy worked or why. I did have a rich selection of meaningful sounding slogans echoing through my head, however.
My prime directive when there was a crisis was the old throwaway line “Somebody needs to do something!” Who was that somebody? People with power. Not me. I had no power, or so I thought. In reality, I was just looking for a simple answer, and I was happy to lay the responsibility for “Doing something” at the feet of someone else—those people over there called government, for instance. And, after offering such an epiphany, I’d kick the dust off my shoes and move on, waiting for somebody to do something.
This is the modern progressive in a nutshell, concerned, ignorant, and sure of the righteousness of their beliefs. In my case, if all else failed, I could offer this bit of wisdom; “Progressives were responsible for child labor laws, the minimum wage, labor unions, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, feminism, Gay rights, you know, all the good stuff.”
Who could argue with that? Anybody who understood that reciting a laundry list of high profile causes that occurred over the last 100 years, wasn't much of an argument, especially since few of the people who say such things, including myself, were around when these events took place. And if they were, it was probably as a casual observer, not an actual participant. Being on the right side of history is important for the maintenance of one’s ego, though.
People tend to forget that Hitler was a socialist/fascist, both of which are really left-wing movements that have been re-imagined as right-wing ideas; big government, a large welfare state, free health care, controlling prices and wages, with greater control of industry, these were all a part of the ideology of “The National Socialist Workers Party,” aka the Nazis. Mussolini was a favorite of progressives, as well.
The eugenics movement was a progressive movement, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was an outright bigot who used her organization to promote the sterilization of undesirables. Meaning minorities; brown and black people and some of the lesser white races, as she defined them. That was her reason to exist.
Listen very carefully, when progressives are pushed, with their backs to the wall, they will speak the truth. Abortion is good for the planet because there are simply too many people. But that doesn’t make it genocide, right? Environmentalism is the cover for such ideas. We’d all be floating in space, I guess, if we don’t take care of the planet.
Another favorite is the hideous; “If conservatives hate abortion so much, are they willing to take care of all those babies?” In other words, if you aren’t going to pay for my baby’s care, I have the right to kill it. That used to be called hostage taking, but no longer. That people think this sounds rational, indicates the depth of depravity humans can sink to, if given a meaningful sounding justification. Hitler would beam with pride.
The other default position for progressives is the notion that conservatives are war loving hawks. Some may be. But evidence suggests that the love of war is pretty evenly spread among politicians. The hatred of war—even when war will stop war—tends to be a uniquely progressive cause. To the progressive mind, all war is about greed, meaning all war is evil. So, lay down your swords, pound them into plowshares to be used by the progressive State. And, remember to allow yourselves to be slaughtered in your beds, if the progressive state says so, which it does after every terror attack and mass slaughter by radical Muslims.
This is really a cover for globalism, which is the belief that essentially three things make the world go round; “capital” “labor” and “Natural Resources,” such as lumber, oil, valuable metals, or anything that can be sold on the open market. “Labor,” meaning human bodies, that’s what labor represents. The greater the supply of cheap labor, the greater the profits. Muslims, radical or otherwise, represent the free flow of cheap labor, as do Mexican or Guatemalans, or whoever wishes to come across a borderless world. Simply understood, the call to surrender to terrorism, using distinctly Christ-like language, is a sales tool to achieve the maximization of profits.
Let me be clear, not all liberals or Democrats are progressives, but they share a common bond. Likewise, many, maybe most conservatives, are every bit as bad as their liberal brethren, sometimes worse. There is one big difference, however, the theory of conservatism or libertarianism as way of limiting the power of the powerful, by limiting the power of government, is a core of both conservatives and libertarians.
By comparison, for the modern liberal and progressive, government is the solution to every problem, which only further empowers what is already the most powerful institution on earth.
One leads to freedom. The other, always, to totalitarianism.
Globalism, then, by its very definition, is the enemy of individual freedom—and, without individual freedom, there can be no freedom, at all.
Mark Magula
I was a progressive. No longer. Not for at least two decades. I changed when I found out the world does not work like I thought it did. Not even close. Government’s don’t create prosperity. People do. Government’s don’t create freedom. More often than not, they are the very reason there is no freedom. That is far more likely to be true than the reverse. But I only vaguely knew this, just like I had no real idea how an economy worked or why. I did have a rich selection of meaningful sounding slogans echoing through my head, however.
My prime directive when there was a crisis was the old throwaway line “Somebody needs to do something!” Who was that somebody? People with power. Not me. I had no power, or so I thought. In reality, I was just looking for a simple answer, and I was happy to lay the responsibility for “Doing something” at the feet of someone else—those people over there called government, for instance. And, after offering such an epiphany, I’d kick the dust off my shoes and move on, waiting for somebody to do something.
This is the modern progressive in a nutshell, concerned, ignorant, and sure of the righteousness of their beliefs. In my case, if all else failed, I could offer this bit of wisdom; “Progressives were responsible for child labor laws, the minimum wage, labor unions, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, feminism, Gay rights, you know, all the good stuff.”
Who could argue with that? Anybody who understood that reciting a laundry list of high profile causes that occurred over the last 100 years, wasn't much of an argument, especially since few of the people who say such things, including myself, were around when these events took place. And if they were, it was probably as a casual observer, not an actual participant. Being on the right side of history is important for the maintenance of one’s ego, though.
People tend to forget that Hitler was a socialist/fascist, both of which are really left-wing movements that have been re-imagined as right-wing ideas; big government, a large welfare state, free health care, controlling prices and wages, with greater control of industry, these were all a part of the ideology of “The National Socialist Workers Party,” aka the Nazis. Mussolini was a favorite of progressives, as well.
The eugenics movement was a progressive movement, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was an outright bigot who used her organization to promote the sterilization of undesirables. Meaning minorities; brown and black people and some of the lesser white races, as she defined them. That was her reason to exist.
Listen very carefully, when progressives are pushed, with their backs to the wall, they will speak the truth. Abortion is good for the planet because there are simply too many people. But that doesn’t make it genocide, right? Environmentalism is the cover for such ideas. We’d all be floating in space, I guess, if we don’t take care of the planet.
Another favorite is the hideous; “If conservatives hate abortion so much, are they willing to take care of all those babies?” In other words, if you aren’t going to pay for my baby’s care, I have the right to kill it. That used to be called hostage taking, but no longer. That people think this sounds rational, indicates the depth of depravity humans can sink to, if given a meaningful sounding justification. Hitler would beam with pride.
The other default position for progressives is the notion that conservatives are war loving hawks. Some may be. But evidence suggests that the love of war is pretty evenly spread among politicians. The hatred of war—even when war will stop war—tends to be a uniquely progressive cause. To the progressive mind, all war is about greed, meaning all war is evil. So, lay down your swords, pound them into plowshares to be used by the progressive State. And, remember to allow yourselves to be slaughtered in your beds, if the progressive state says so, which it does after every terror attack and mass slaughter by radical Muslims.
This is really a cover for globalism, which is the belief that essentially three things make the world go round; “capital” “labor” and “Natural Resources,” such as lumber, oil, valuable metals, or anything that can be sold on the open market. “Labor,” meaning human bodies, that’s what labor represents. The greater the supply of cheap labor, the greater the profits. Muslims, radical or otherwise, represent the free flow of cheap labor, as do Mexican or Guatemalans, or whoever wishes to come across a borderless world. Simply understood, the call to surrender to terrorism, using distinctly Christ-like language, is a sales tool to achieve the maximization of profits.
Let me be clear, not all liberals or Democrats are progressives, but they share a common bond. Likewise, many, maybe most conservatives, are every bit as bad as their liberal brethren, sometimes worse. There is one big difference, however, the theory of conservatism or libertarianism as way of limiting the power of the powerful, by limiting the power of government, is a core of both conservatives and libertarians.
By comparison, for the modern liberal and progressive, government is the solution to every problem, which only further empowers what is already the most powerful institution on earth.
One leads to freedom. The other, always, to totalitarianism.
Globalism, then, by its very definition, is the enemy of individual freedom—and, without individual freedom, there can be no freedom, at all.
Mark Magula
