Posted 5/26/2010 05:15:00 PM by Douglas

This pretty much explains the nature in government compromise, all summed up in Rand Paul's comments.

Speaking broadly, modern government moves between two poles, each of which has a seventeenth-century thinker as its champion, and each of which is focused on minimizing a particular form of injustice. On one side is Thomas Hobbes, who defended the creation of an authoritarian government as the only viable means of protecting certain individuals and groups from injustices perpetrated by other individuals and groups. On the other side is John Locke, who advocated a minimal state in order to protect individuals and groups against injustices perpetrated by governments themselves. Taken to an extreme, the Hobbesian pole leads to totalitarianism, while the Lockean pole terminates in the quasi-anarchism of the night watchman state.

So that's where it boils down. If you advocate the government solving everyone's problems, or letting people do their own thing. Neither extreme is very appealing, and most people know which side they sit on, but sadly, the majority of people are close to the middle that it really doesn't make much difference. Republicans funding Medicaid, or Democrats cutting NASA, it's all beets in the same stew.

But the meat in this argument is interesting to me. Who gets to decide when the government power is used to impose the people's will on those that, by gar, just don't want to? The Lefties love it that big brother imposes its will on states that wish to restrict abortion laws, and the Right finds it just fine that their church is given a tax break, and apparently everyone wants grandma to have free health care. So think about the issues and see if they fit into your core beliefs; don't force your beliefs on the issues just because you already agree with it.