Quote:
Originally Posted by mburbank
Au contraire! I think having a constant awareness of the depths of human depravity is the best recipe for avoiding it. I think humility makes for wiser council than arrogance. Of course, there might be something in between. I just haven't seen it on anything resembling a national scale. Any national scale.
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I'm gonna respond just to that first part. You may never have personally SEEN it, but it did exist once. It was called the United States of America, and it existed for a little while right after the Republic was founded. It was a product of human thought, and so not perfect in form, but it did exist.
A few real guys got together in the spirit of humility, armed with all the latest Liberal ideas, and hammered out a plan for a nation that was tempered by the understanding that even any one of them would surely go nuts with all the power available to an absolute, unchecked ruler. This was the first time any nation was founded on these kind of ideas. This was the first Liberal national experiment.
Benjamin Franklin once said the Continental Congress gave us "a Republican, if they can keep it." Something like that... We had it for a little less time than the time it took us to figure out how to take advantage of it for personal gain.
Max, it's easy to SAY there's something you want to see ogevrnemtn be like in one way, but it's a Hell of a lot harder to think it all the way through and dream up how it might actually work. You just cannot have a socialist government based in the idea that we all get what we want whether or not we have earned it and also, at the same time, have a goevrnment wherein we aren't subject to the whim of those that want from us what we don't think it's fair to give.
America used to be the country where we actually based our culture on the concept that humans are fundamentally crappy people if you don't obstruct that option. Is it still? Why or why not?