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Saturday, July 21, 2012

Men Are No Angels > The Deception of Perfection

From Kyle Becker at americanthinker.com

What made the nation thrive from its onset was a political architecture that explicitly acknowledged that human beings are flawed.  The Constitution was founded on the truth about human beings, which is that men are no angels.  The entire system of checks and balances, divided powers, federalism, and individual rights is drawn from Madison's notion that natural ambition must be made to counter ambition.  If the ambitious were to wield power without check, then their foibles would only become amplified, and others would suffer due to actions that are not their own

The social engineers, the meddling masterminds, and the self-appointed savers of the "underprivileged" have thus perverted self-interest, and in no wise have reformed it or channeled it in a productive direction.  The left has merely subsidized socially destructive and self-destructive behavior by failing to allow people to adapt to the negative consequences of their own actions.  By not allowing people the chance to triumph over their initial lots in life, the modern left has deprived people of an opportunity to succeed on their own terms and according to their own natural limitations.

This is a great tragedy that sows the seeds for demoralization; by removing the ability for men to determine the outcomes of their own lives, the state is bending all citizens into obeisance to a paternalistic, necessarily corrupt, and cronyist party.  By removing men's authority over their own bodies, the national health care system being devised will lead to less personal responsibility for one's health and more social costs.  The debate was tellingly framed as "don't you care about the uninsured?," which was a minority of the citizenry, after accounting for those who did not desire to purchase health insurance.  Every anecdotal demonstration of the "unfairness" of the country was trotted out as evidence for "comprehensive reform" -- meaning the capture of one-sixth of the economy by the government.  There are devastating practical consequences to adopting flawed political philosophy.

The deception of perfection is leading many of us blindly into a world where one cannot lead one's own life and be influenced by chance.  It's a world where people's lives are shaped and effectively determined by their flawed fellow human beings.  The random misfortunes of life are thus leading to systematized misfortune -- which is in turn exacerbated and made direr by the state's removal of all personal responsibility for and control over one's own life to the extent made possible by a free market and a government that safeguards individual rights.

The left is not altering mankind's immutable state of affairs, one that entails luck and natural diversity.  Rather, it is simply turning the role of chance and the weak-minded perception of life's unfairness into an internally divisive society laying the foundations for all-powerful government.

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