PostHeaderIcon Robin Hood vs. Good Samaritan

Commenting elsewhere in a discussion among typical conservative culture warriors, lamenting the state of our culture regarding the abortion and gay marriage issues, I offered the following, which is probably worth memorializing here:

If I may be permitted to comment on these issues from a political perspective, I would like to point out three intertwined faulty premises, underlying all of these morality controversies in our national body politic.

  • The first is collectivism – the faulty premise that the needs and wellbeing of this amorphous thing we call ‘society,’ trumps those of its individual members.
  • The second is altruism – the faulty premise that looking out for oneself is bad, and sacrificing oneself for others is good.
  • The third is democracy – the faulty premise that a majority has the moral right to impose their will upon a minority.

Mixed together, this is one toxic brew, which has been used to poison the minds of most sheeple in America, whichever side of the Incumbrepublocrat duopoly they find themselves on. One cannot assert the primacy of the collective, without trammeling the rights of its individual constituents. Then, if the model for governing that collective, is either the Robin Hood of the Left or the Good Samaritan of the Right, the individual citizen is regarded as merely a vassal.

Woe be unto anyone, who would dare to be so selfish, as to try to deny support for society’s vaunted ‘victims.’ Stir in democracy, and there will be a constant battle over quantifying that support, how best to extract it from the producers, and identifying those worthy of victimhood. This creates class warfare, and squelches individual initiative, which arrests human progress, as we devolve into the zero sum game of a mindless feudal society.

This only benefits the arrogant self-styled elites, who get fat posturing as our leaders and rulers. When one thinks about it, the federal government our Founders devised, to avoid all of this, was sheer brilliance. That it worked like a charm for the first hundred years, is a testament to their wisdom. It is just too bad that our more recent ancestors allowed the altruists and collectivists to screw it up. â—„Daveâ–º

One Response to “Robin Hood vs. Good Samaritan”

  • Troy says:

    Well said – as usual.

    To repeat my favorite bit of wisdom… no body of rules or laws is ever any better than the people who enforce them. In the case of our founding documents, the ultimate enforcer is WTS.

    In just the last few days, while talking about the GOP primaries, I have heard several otherwise intelligent people exclaim, in so many words, that they simply refuse to get involved. Sadly, I am unable to convince any of them that what they are really saying is that they refuse to take responsibility for their own liberty.

    The usual comeback is that their input will not matter anyway so why try? To me, that is the functional equivalent of saying that a penny has no monetary value, even though 100 million of them is a nice fortune. BTW, I find quite a number of pennies in store parking lots because some people actually throw them away.

    Troy

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