The Statist and Soft Tyranny.

In light of the Obama administration’s decision to ram down the throat of the American consumer Utopian fuel-efficiency standards I found the following excerpt from Mark Levin appropriate:

The modern liberal believes in the supremacy of the state, thereby rejecting the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the order of the civil society, in whole or part. For the modern liberal, the individual’s imperfection and personal pursuits impede the objective of a Utopian state. And this, modern liberalism promotes what French historian Alexis de Toqueville described as a soft tyranny, which becomes increasingly more oppressive, potentially leading to a hard tyranny (some form of totalitarianism.) As the word “liberal” is, in its classical meaning, the opposite of authoritarian, it is more accurate, therefore, to characterize the modern liberal as a Statist. The founders understood that the greatest threat to liberty is an all powerful central government, where the few dictate to the many.

Levin additionally quotes James Madison in Federalist #51: “you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. ”

And so here we are now, where the Statists pursue legalized theft in the name of “public good, public interest, fairness, equality, safety,” etc. But who decides what is good for the public or in the best interest of the consumer?

As Levin reminds us, “there are nearly 1000 federal departments, agencies, and divisions that make laws and enforce them”:

“The Statist as also constructed a fourth branch of government — an enormous administrative state — which exists to oversee and implement his policies. It is a massive yet amorphous bureaucracy that consists of a workforce of nearly 2 million civilian employees. It administers a budget of over $3 trillion a year. It turns out a mind numbing number of rules that regulate energy, the environment, business, labor, employment, transportation, housing, agriculture, food, drugs, education, etc. even the slightest human activity apparently requires its intervention: clothing labels on women’s dresses, cosmetics ingredients, and labeling. It even reaches into the bathroom, mandating showerhead flow rates and allowable gallons per flush for toilets.”

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, at 1400 pages, is just 1/53rd the size of the Federal Register. But the point isn’t just the size of the federal government so much as how it ignores the United States Constitution and abuses its power.

And so the last reminder from Levin: the point of the American Revolution was to diffuse and decentralize authority among many imperfect men who ran government by enumerating federal power, separating powers both within the federal government in between it and the state and local governments.these were the very basis of the Constitution, he signed to isolate and limit the possibility of even soft tyranny.