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Home The Right to be Better People

The Right to be Better People



The interesting thing about this moment from last night's Cruz vs. Sanders debate is that in this exchange both men are very articulate spokesmen for two different worldviews.

Cruz once called Sanders an honest Socialist. And unlike the Romney vs. Obama or Trump vs. Hillary debates, you are seeing something fairly close to "honest Socialism" here.

Ted Cruz defines what a right is. A right is the freedom to make decisions for yourself.

Bernie Sanders ridicules that. You can make decisions for yourself, but what good does that do you if the government doesn't give you the things you need and you can't afford to pay for them.

Sanders says that rights are entitlements. Cruz argues that they are freedoms.

And that is what the debate comes down to. Freedom or entitlement. And the tricky border where we try to combine the two. But that is what our government does.

The Sanders position is easy. Obamacare doesn't go far enough. The government ought to give you everything you want. And then there will be no problems. Cruz's counter is to show how badly that works around the world. But that's an abstract. The ordinary people in the audience are not especially interested in events in Cuba, the USSR or even Canada.

Entitlements are always more seductive. Especially with a corrupt government that's giving away so many things to so many people anyway. And Sanders can angrily play on class envy. Look at Trump's mansions. Look at how the rich are living. While you can't get the health care you need. It's malicious and misleading. But it's hard to resist.

The left has played this range of emotions, greed, pathos, envy, outrage, like a violin for a long time.

Cruz's counter to it, freedom and principle, are much tougher sells.

Conservatives ask us to be better than we are. Liberals ask us to be worse. They tell us that we ought to be angry and feel sorry for ourselves. And that if we don't have what we want, we ought to take it from others.

At the heart of this is a deeper question.

If a right is freedom, then freedom demands responsibility. But if a right is entitlement, then it's a demand. A demand that others give us what we deserve.

Free people fight for independence. But the left's revolutions are struggles for tyranny. They protest for better masters. They violently agitate for rulers who will run their lives better.

And that too is in the air here. Obama didn't give you enough. Vote Bernie. BernieCare will do everything that ObamaCare didn't. And if it doesn't, there's SteinCare. Or the NHS.

The left claims to be rational, but Bernie is playing on emotions. He's agitating for outrage. And he's angry. The thing that he is angry about may not really be health care. It probably isn't. Radicals channel personal anger into political outrage. How many of the anti-Trump marchers really hate Trump. How many of them hate their parents or their meaningless lives.

Freedom asks us to be better people. It tells us that we have responsibilities to live up to. The left imposes responsibilities on us. It gives us no choice in them. Just as it gives us no choice in health care.

The debate, every genuine debate between conservatives and the left, comes down to the question of whether we want to be better people. Do we want to have the right to choose or the right to get stuff. This is often a difficult question. It's especially difficult when it comes to health care. Yet the seductive answer, the one offered by Sanders, is deeply corrupting and doomed.

No society can be better, more able to make good decisions, than the people it is composed of.

Socialism degrades the people and enters a failure cycle in which it is less able to live up to its promises with every descent into deeper government control. In health care, Socialism gradually corrupts the system into a hybrid over-regulated mess that raises costs until only the government can fund it. And then only the government can ration it. But de-socializing medicine is too painful and scary. It's easier to try and tinker with it, to "repair" ObamaCare instead of getting rid of it.

And then the cycle spirals further down.

A society lives or dies by its people. If they can take on responsibilities and make good decisions, then it can grow and be strong. If they can't, then it decays.

And everything else is just bread and circuses.

Our founding documents endow us with the right to be better people. That is what built the America we have. Being better people is hard work. It's always more seductive to take the left turn.

That is why civilizations don't last. The Romans got tired of virtue and principle. So did the Europeans. Virtues and principles are just too much work. They get in the way of what we really want. Whether it's health care or smashing the other guy in the face. Values are for squares. Decency is for the prissy. Principles are for pussies. Morals are for hypocrites. Doing the right thing is for suckers. Hard work is for those too dumb to game the system.

Entitlements can give us some of what we want. For a short time. But no entitlement can make us better people. And it takes being a better person to achieve what we truly want, whether it's building a family, a business or a nation. Short cuts past virtue work for some, for a time, much like any entitlement. But they don't work for societies. Individuals can take from others. But societies can't. The individual can redistribute. But everyone can't live off redistribution. Not even if they take everything from all the "rich" people.

Morals are like that too. A society can support some degree of criminality, immortality, dishonesty and assorted abusive behaviors. But it can't function when a growing minority and then majority no longer does anything except seek short term advantages at everyone else's expense.

Then it does. And it leaves behind some impressive buildings. And historians wondering what went wrong. The answer is as simple as it is obvious. It's the people that went wrong.

It's always the people.

Governments exist to do the will of the people. In free nations, government do this in an open and representative fashion. In other systems, the mechanism is covert. The dictator is the id of the people, as Stalin was in Russia or Saddam in Iraq, committing the atrocities they wish to commit, without being willing to admit it. Under the left, the repressive system steals on behalf of those who want a government that steals for them, that terrorizes for them and that murders for them.

Socialism is inherently dishonest. Sanders is about as close to an honest Socialist as you can get on a  national debate stage. But his Socialism is a lie. The left seduces us into evil. That is what it always does. It seduces us into agreeing to let men like him do our dirty work for us. It tells us that we can have everything we want without having to go over to our neighbor's house and steal his things.

It plays on our emotions. It summons up pity and outrage. And in the end it leaves us with nothing.

The only honest societies are those of free people. Moral or immoral. The tyranny of authority is inherently dishonest. It seduces and destroys by warping our moral codes to justify its abuses because it is giving us what we think we want. Its deepest crime is that it, like Sanders, assures us that we are good people. That is why the left is always outrage and always reassuring its followers that they are good people. A lie reveals the truth underneath.

What is evil? It doesn't start out as a fanged monster. Though it can end up that way.

Instead it seduces us by telling us that we do not need to be better people because we are wronged. It teaches us anger and self-pity. It tells us that we have the right to hurt others because we have been hurt. It says that society is inherently immoral and that we don't have to follow its rules. It promises us that it will build a better society in accordance with our needs and whims. It assures us that such a society will be good... because we are good people.

And if we are good people, then what we will do must be good.

How could good people be bad? How could a society based on the idea of helping everyone by taking away their freedom and giving them everything they need be bad?

Good people can't do bad things. If we set out to do good by giving everyone health care, the end result must be good. If it isn't, then it's because someone sabotaged it. Or it didn't go far enough.

We have the right to be better people. And we have the right not to. That's freedom.

Everything that we do has consequences. We are responsible for what we do. The first lie of those who deprive us of our freedom is to assure us that consequences and responsibility can be collectivized. We have the right to believe anything we want. But belief does not change reality. Mobs don't eliminate responsibility or consequences. They just obscure them for a little while.

We always have the freedom to choose. Free societies tell us this. Tyrannies lie to us. When we forget that we have freedom and responsibility, then we fall into evil.

Comments

  1. This is one of your best.

    You could improve it a little by ending questions with '?'

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  2. Anonymous9/2/17

    I think Sanders, Cruz, and you, Sultan K., are all missing the point. A right is something I inherently have that nobody may take from me, save by force: life, liberty. If someone has to provide it for me...it's not a right. I don't have a right to food if I don't grow it or purchase it in a voluntary and consensual exchange between me and the producer (with or without middlemen). I don't have a right to health care, because someone must provide it for me. If I have a right to it, it is being provided, ultimately, at the point of a gun, whether it's pointed at the medical provider or the taxpayer who will have to pay him for health care I receive. Cruz doesn't want to say this, because then Bernie can play the heartless card on him (guess what, he did it anyway). Ted is so mean, he wants Lorana to die because Ted won't give her free healthcare or Donald Trump's mansion. Bernie isn't mean for wanting to take Donald's money to pay for Lorana's healthcare because nobody likes Donald or rich people anyway and they deserve to have their ill-gotten gains taken for our benefit. I don't blame Sen. Cruz, it is a tough point to argue.

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  3. Thank you for another insightful article...anyone with an intact conscience would know this is true.

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  4. Anonymous9/2/17

    Thanks for a terrific summary of the inherent evils of socialism and other leftist paradises. It's truly frightening that this information isn't taught to every school child, early and often, and that it should need to be brought forth by the occasional conservative pundit. We are truly in big trouble when a Sanders or Warren can even be considered fit for leadership of this republic.

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  5. Infidel9/2/17

    Good article.

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  6. Ah, Mr. Knish. I wish you weren't so insightful and so articulate. Between free stuff and freedom, most will choose free stuff.

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  7. Anonymous10/2/17


    Those Declaration rights, "Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness", are in reference to the Individual, the smallest minority in society. They are preserved by voluntary or government imposed restraint on others who would infringe them.

    But, any duty imposed on an individual to provide any good or service to another infringes first Liberty, then, of necessity, Pursuit of Happiness, and ultimately, Life.

    Leftist "rights" know no bounds. Thus duty imposed is boundless.

    Boundless duty = Total slavery.
    No Pursuit of Happiness = Hopelessness.
    No Life = Death.

    Q.E.D.

    ABSJ1136

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  8. You've distilled the two world views down to their essences. I'd like to reinforce two points.

    The first is that the underlying emotion of the Progressives is envy. They convince people with a false morality that somehow it isn't fair that somebody has something that somebody else doesn't. Their idea of morality is equal outcome, not equal rights. Never mind that the Haves may studied harder, worked harder and took financial risk, that they have more provokes their envy. It's one reason that they don't like religion or alternately they pervert religion, because envy isn't a religious value, it's a sin.

    The second point is on rights vs entitlements. A right is something that no one and no government should take from you. An entitlement, however, can't be a right because it requires that something is provided by someone else, either a product or a service. If its done by choice, typically by paying someone who can freely choose, then that's fine. The problem, however, of confusing an entitlement with a right is that if no one wants to provide the entitlement then the government necessarily must coerce someone to provide it, which is the definition of tyranny.

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  9. Amen Daniel,

    No thing to add on that.

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  10. This is simply the finest exposition of that nexus of moral, psychological and political principles that make up redistribution. Brilliant!

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  11. D.D.Mao10/2/17

    As we witness daily in America today there is a war between two tribes who demand FREE education, FREE healthcare and equality while being perpetually on government entitlement rolls. While the other tribe who believe in FREE people and realize NOTHING is FREE in life.......someone must pay for it. This pragmatism was one of the ways President Trump attracted his huge support during his successful campaign in the last election. It was billed as a "Flight 93" election where you either storm the cockpit or you go down with the plane. The articulate intellectual exchange described above is what was sorely missing from the past campaign ON BOTH SIDES of the aisle. And from what is evident the way campaigns will be from here on out unfortunately.

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  12. This is a keeper Daniel. Best article I've seen in some time distilling socialism and freedom and the consequences based on which one is chosen. Thank you for the reminder that freedom means responsibility and hard work. I just wish the citizens of America, especially the young people, could have the ears to hear and the minds to comprehend. I'm concerned it may just be too late. Nevertheless we must continue to strive to write and speak truth.

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  13. Anonymous11/2/17

    Well said!

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  14. AesopFan14/2/17

    Follow up this outstanding essay by reading Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom."

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  15. This is an excellent exposition of the essence of the conflict, but I think it still leaves out one thing: Becoming "better people" includes being charitable on the individual level. A truly good society is one in which voluntary charity and kindness abound, and they are deeply needed. This is the society which the Bible demands of us, and as long as we do not create it, the socialist statist thieves will always have their examples of suffering which they will use for their power grabs.

    I did see some examples of Trump's charity mentioned during the campaign, but I would like to see more. From what I remember, Mitt Romney was actually a shining example, but evidently he didn't really want to win enough to try.

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  16. Principles are for p-ssies.

    Is this now considered polite language?

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