One last post on the London riots a couple of weeks ago, in this case an observation from Jonah Goldberg.

If you begin a sentence saying that nothing excuses wanton mob violence and theft, but refuse to come to a full-stop with a period or, better yet, an exclamation point, you know that there’s a “but” coming that will invalidate all of the platitudes that came before it. When someone says, “There’s no excuse for violence, but . . . ,” that “but” is a Pandora’s box of leftist banshees that have left human wreckage in their wake for millennia.

Ultimately, the Left’s weakness for riots stems, I believe, from two things: statist paternalism and power-worship. It’s an amazingly reactionary sentiment when you think about it. The lower classes are savages who need the benign power of the state to keep them from acting on their savage instincts. When the state doesn’t nurture and civilize them, the urban masses revert to their animal natures. The Left doesn’t condone the violence, of course, they just say the violence is to be expected when conservatives cut social spending. Or as I put it in my column, “In other words, the cuts don’t justify the violence, but the threat of violence justifies avoiding cuts.” On a cynical level, when the lower classes rise up and wreak havoc, the self-appointed spokesmen for society’s “victims” see an opportunity to press their advantage. They hold up the mob like a Medusa’s Head, to petrify the bourgeoisie into making ever more concessions.

As for power worship, there’s always been something about the power of crowds that seduces the leftist mind (see Liberal Fascism). There’s also something about the “authenticity” of street thugs that’s intoxicating to liberals and way too many young people generally, particularly if there’s a racial component thrown in. (If the Black Panthers were white, everyone would instantly recognize them as indistinguishable from neo-Nazis.) How else to explain how so many middle class and even upper class criminals got caught up in this authentic expression of lumpenproletarian rage?

Andrew McCarthy has a great observation in last weekend’s GOP debate, which found Mitt Romney utilizing Federalism in order to attack Obamacare even as he (still, foolishly) defends Romneycare — mandates by a state versus the federal government. While McCarthy believes Romney’s recent discovery of Federalism is simply a convenient ploy to deflect criticisms, he finds Romney’s argument nonetheless factually perfect.

The federal government has a few discrete areas of national concern to regulate. The rest belong to the states and the people, to regulate or not as they see fit. In a free society, that means decisions on most matters of community life get made by the community that has to live with them — and pay for them. In a pluralistic society, that means we could have 50 different ways of doing things — meaning that if you find yourself in a state that is foolish enough to mandate the purchase of health insurance subsidized by taxes or penalties, you are free to move to some state that isn’t.

The inability in a federalist system to impose a “one size fits all” solution on every choice decompresses a society — which is now a society of over 300 million people with very different ideas about how we should live. It promotes social harmony by allowing people to gravitate to the communities where life best suits them.

If I were living in Massachusetts (or anyplace else), I would argue that health care is not a corporate asset and that it’s none of anyone’s business whether I choose to buy coverage. But if I lost that debate, and if the coercive mandate law bothered me enough, I could move to some state where the law was different. Or I might decide that, in the greater scheme of things, life in Massachusetts was worth enduring the nuisance and costs of state policies to which I objected. But in either event, none of my calculations would be the concern of someone living in, say, Colorado — at least as long as he wasn’t being made to pay for it.

To the contrary, Romney’s competitors opined that the federal constitution barred states like Massachusetts from imposing an individual mandate as part of an effort to ensure that every citizen in the state was covered. And from there, the putative champions of limited government went haywire. Some want gay marriage banned. Some want abortion banned and criminalized. If you listened to them long enough, it was like listening to Democrats: If I disapprove of it, surely it must be prohibited. If I approve, surely it must be the law.

I confess to thinking we’ve lost our way. The Framers gave us a federal constitution for a confident, self-determining people — people who could be trusted to make sensible choices, to govern themselves through legislation rather than be strait-jacketed in the uncompromising logic of law.

… [Our overspending woes and massive national debt] gets solved only by drastically slashing the functions of the central government. It gets solved by zeroing out departments, agencies, and bureaucracies; by returning those functions to the states so that the people directly affected can decide what ought to be done and how much they’re willing to pay for it — not with other people’s money but with their own.

What does McCarthy forecast our chances of this occurring? Zero! Heh. That’s hardly the attitude that brought down King George, eh Andrew?

There was a great commentary today by Bill McGurn regarding the state of religious freedom in America today, and where that’s trending (hint, not up). McGurn’s opinion cited a recent case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which the Supreme Court agreed to hear shortly.

The background of the case centers on a teacher working at this small religious school who was fired for breaking a church belief of taking church disputes outside the community (in this case punitive action against the teacher due to absenteeism). But what’s really on trial here isn’t one teacher or one school, rather the idea that the First Amendment guarantees the freedom to exercise ones religion (not just a freedom to believe, but exercising it) based on the rules that religion.

At the core of their concern is just this: the politically correct rewriting of the First Amendment. Post-1791, what made America’s religious freedom truly radical was not simply that it allowed people to worship (or not to worship) as they saw fit. The radical part was the guarantee it gave to corporate freedoms: to hold property together, to own newspapers, to run schools, to open hospitals and clinics, etc.

That understanding is now up for grabs. Last week, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear said approval for a local merger that would create a new Catholic hospital system will depend on maintaining a “public mission”—by which he means the performance of procedures, such as sterilization, at odds with church teaching.

In San Francisco, opponents of circumcision recently attempted to outlaw it via state ballot. The California State University system has been found within its legal rights to deem a Christian fraternity and sorority unfit for recognition. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board declared that two Catholic colleges are not in fact Catholic.

These are not cases of people trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Instead they involve the question whether faith communities are free to live their own beliefs in their own institutions. Somehow the more “tolerant” we become, the more difficult that becomes.

Given: in cases of a religion forbidding modern medicine or pharmaceuticals, etc., which leads to death, particularly that of a child who has no power to decide for themselves, this issue becomes more complex. But in the case of a an adult teacher joining a private institution knowing full well its rules, I have no sympathy. When you join a particular group, you submit to that communities values and policies — and this, by the way, is a principle pillar of rationale behind the 10th Amendment and Federalism (The U.S. Constitution defined specific power, yielding all others to the states and the people, i.e. communities, whereas the states could define any powers except those bestowed to the federal government via the Constitution. Don’t like your state, you can move and force the other 49 to compete).

That is, if one can simply force a group to mend its beliefs — albeit justified when being deprived of life, liberty or pursuit of happiness — the very definition of a “group” becomes meaningless.

Here’s the best retort and thought of the week on what I call the entitlement-hooligan riots in the U.K.

Presumably, London-type riots would not last long in either Texas, or Arizona. — Adam Baldwin on twitter.

Indeed. Thank God for the Second Amendment. I say thank God rather than “Thank Jefferson” because even Jefferson would have understood that such a right is natural, bestowed by The Creator, or if you’re not religious at very least by virtue of having been born a human being. Contrast that with the grand Ponzi scheme, house-of-cards, and castle built on sand known as the Entitlement State, which you better believe is bestowed by consent of the government, rather than by the governed. Things legislated as exceptions and fractions have grown into behemoths as rule and whole. Even so, fully expect that as our 80-million-checks a month government grows amok such riots will no doubt begin here once those government dole checks end. That’s the trap of Socialism-lite — rather difficult to replug that genie once it’s out.

To combat the former Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan took the Sixties and Seventies notion of détente and turned it on it’s head into a policy of rollback. At the time it was called extremist, fantasy or dangerous. But this rollback was incremental, and certainly did not defeat the Soviet Union in a day, or even a week or in an election cycle.

The Tea Parties across the country, along with leadership from some Republicans like Paul Ryan, did just that with our own little cold war — began executing a policy of rollback. As in Reagan’s day, Democrats seek to equate those persons as fanatical (or even, as Vice President Joe Biden shamefully did today, as “terrorists,” or Dem Rep. Luis Gutierrez calling Republicans “arsonists” even as he votes in favor of the “arson” bill.)

On one side we have fiscal liberals seeking to ever expand the tax, spend and government growth policies of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ. On the other we have a group of limited-government advocates who take the traditional view of Constitutional powers that our founders intended. (And yes, “war” is an allegory or metaphor, not meant as literal and it’s a cryin’ shame I need to add that caveat).

And yet this debt-ceiling battle is just one of many to come in this cold war.

Taken for what it is — a way to keep the conversation and debate rolling, a way to force the liberal intelligentsia to argue (and I think a weak and defeated argument at that) why Keynesian economics is best or even effective — years from now at the end of the long war conservatives may look back at this debt-ceiling deal and conclude it was the first battle in a victorious movement.

As The Weekly Standard noted, “Only 10 of the 87 GOP freshmen, the Tea Party core in Congress, voted “no” [to John Boehner’s original bill]. Credit the Tea Party, however, with creating the climate for cutting spending and the idea of using the debt limit as a vehicle for doing it. No Tea Party, no cuts, and a happy Obama.”

However, conversely, the debt deal is most certainly a short-term loss — if passed as amended by the Senate, it will be the largest debt-ceiling hike in history ($2,400,000,000,000, oh, and the previous record was also held by Obama); a major hit to defense spending; filled with illusionary “cuts” of “spending levels” rather than actual cuts to spending — that is, where because you spend less than you originally intended you call it a “cut” even though you actually spent; and any true spending cuts are ridiculously small — for example, the $900,000,000,000 in cuts occurs unevenly per year over 10 years, whereas the new spending of $900,000,000,000 is added to the budget all at once (only in the Beltway can you call this even Stephen). Put it this way, the $7,000,000,000 cut in fiscal 2011-2011 is what our federal government borrows every 37 hours.

In that light, this deal is crap.

But look at it this way — the objective is limited government and limited spending, and the only way to achieve that — and I mean only way — is to have the right fiscal conservatives win elections, especially this coming one. People are ticked off about the spending. Any opportunity to have a conversation on spending front-and-center in the media spotlight for as long as this one has lasted is a good thing. With Boehner’s bill, we get to have this same debt-ceiling fight again in six months. Combine that with almost 10 percent unemployment and stagnant GDP change and the Tea Party is literally controlling the atmosphere and subject matter of national politics.

I think Charles Krauthammer put it the best:

Look, I think if you’re a Republican, you have to look at the long game and the long view. This has been a tremendous success. The president in January gives a State of the Union address in which he talks about more spending on innovation, energy, all the pet stuff he believes in. Here we are nine months later — that sounds like it’s out of the Jurassic era. We are now in the debt era.

The whole idea of the Tea Party originally was to bring up – it was created by the stimulus and Obamacare in opposition to this huge expansion of government and debt. And what we’re talking about today — monopolizing all discussion is debt. That in and of itself is a victory. We are now in the debt era. It will be central to all political debates.

They’ve gotten quite a lot, a trillion dollars of cuts today. I’m also unhappy about the defense cuts. But you cannot govern out of one House.

If, given the terrible economic numbers that came out on Friday, the president has to defend this economy next year, he loses. The Republicans would have to run the worst campaign in history not to win. And then with control of the White House and the Senate and the House, you can make the changes you want.

I don’t know if the amended debt-ceiling limit deal will become law or not. I do know that right now those who believe in limited government and separation of powers have all the momentum. Don’t mess that up.