The Soundtrack of Progressive Destruction

"2013 has been a banner year for damning self-portraits of American progressivism," writes Daren Jonescu in an American Thinker piece so delicious that it's impossible to stop quoting.

"If you like your plan, you can keep it." This is a perfect iteration of the basic lie that has fueled modernity's "progress" down the drain of history -- or History, as progressive thinkers would have it. [snip]

You have heard this lie, and witnessed the tyrannical dialectic it sets in motion, your whole life, as have your parents and grandparents. Variations on this theme have become the soundtrack of late modernity's decline. The theme remains the same; only the melodic details are changed to suit the collectivist totalitarian agenda item of the moment.

"If you like your current healthcare arrangements, you can keep them" -- except that our intention is to delegitimize, denigrate, and finally outlaw all private healthcare arrangements.

"If you like your 'negative rights,' you can keep them" -- except that the new positive rights we are gradually introducing into the political lexicon will necessarily override your life, liberty, and property, not to mention trumping all the secondary rights derived from those initial three, such as speech, association, and religion.

Servants Have Neither Choices Nor Responsibility

Warning that "A free man is responsible for his choices" while "a servant has neither choices nor responsibility," John Hayward challenges Mayor Bloomberg's argument for the 16 oz soda ban.

Bloomberg’s soda ban is just one sobering reminder that independence and responsibility are inextricably linked.  If people don’t want to accept responsibility for their actions, they must sacrifice their liberty as well...

In the United States, liberals have spent generations selling the illusion of "independence" without responsibility — the promise of government benefits provided at no great cost to individual liberty. This illusion shattered forever when the American Left finally achieved its dream of government-controlled health care. The true cost of dependency could no longer be concealed. The Catholic Church is no longer free to follow its religious conscience. Contrary to President Obama’s assurances, you don’t get to keep your old plan if you liked it.

The War on Obesity is still fairly young, as political crusades go, but it has spotlighted the loss of liberty that inevitably accompanies dependence. If the government is to be held accountable for financing your health care, it must have power over your life, in order to keep those socialized costs down. Once the basic premise of socialism is accepted, and everyone is collectively obliged to pay for everyone else, this only makes sense. 

And if New Yorkers don't stand up to Bloomberg's "benevolent tyranny"?

...there will eventually be no purpose in complaining about it, because you’ll never get your lost choices back. You will be expected to grow comfortable with a more limited range of motion, within the perpetually shrinking cage your betters have designed for you. You will become steadily less responsible for your life, and the lives of your children, which is very soothing. You’ll also be less free, by definition, as your “unacceptable” choices are taken away. It is widely assumed that Americans are no longer the sort of people who grow angry over such things.