Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

They want this because they want to rule us using the administrative method, and they want all our social institutions to be modeled after the hierarchical bureaucracy.

With the bureaucratic model every person is an interchangeable cog in the machine. You need uniform people, uniformly socialized, to live in that society.

And let it be said: liberals think that this uniform socialization is the very best thing in the world, the very acme of equality, evolution and justice.

But, as Dennis Prager writes, when the government gets bigger, the people get smaller.

Among the things left and right, religious and secular, agree on is that one of the few real needs human beings have is to be needed.
When we are not needed, life feels pointless.

The way that men feel needed is through their work. The way that women feel needed is through their love.

Many women feel particularly alive when needed by their young children; many men feel worthy when needed by their family and/or their work.

This begins in childhood.

Give a boy a special task -- just about any task -- and he blossoms. Give a girl a person -- in fact, almost any living being -- who depends on her, and she blossoms.

Notice that in the world of bureaucratic administration there is no special. And there is no person to look after. There are only the rules, and the administrator or the clerk must always act according to the rules.

There is an exception to this: the power politician, who may do as he pleases.

Prager goes on to talk about how government shreds people of their sense of importance. "The more the state does, the less its citizens are needed to do."

Everything is set up in the liberal administrative state to strip people of their importance and to create uniformity. We conservatives must understand that every uniform administrative structure is an enemy of freedom and a life of meaning. Because to a cog in the bureaucratic machine, everything is pointless.

There was a time when progressive people indicted the commercial-industrial capitalist economy for this. Mines, textile mills, and factories were accused of making people into automatons, to be thrown away when exhausted. Today these same people complain more about the sameness and uniformity of consumer goods and less about the factories. That's probably because there is less backbreaking assembly-line labor today as the manufacturing sector has automated and freed up workers for less arduous work. So the critics must find new things to criticize.

In the new world of the internet, why do we need uniform, soul-destroying schools that make children think that life is pointless? Why do we need uniform, soul-destroying government health systems? Why do we need uniform, soul-destroying government welfare systems that make lower-income men think that life is pointless?

There's an agenda here for conservatives. It is our job to resocialize America away from the uniform, administrative, bureaucratic method. And show Americans that there can be a world in which everyone is needed.

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/18/10 11:32 am ET

We Should Thank the Democrats

THE EDITORS at National Review put out a defiant challenge to Democrats today, telling them that passing ObamaCare is just the beginning.Are they right? Or just blowing smoke at the Democrats?For now, they are just blowing smoke. Just like the Democrats who are saying that it's a done deal and ObamaCare will pass and the people like it, they really like it.I've written that ObamaCare is a shame...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/17/10 11:51 am ET

Beyond School Choice

AS THE NATION'S education system continues to rot, President Obama has come up with a revision of No Child Left Behind that rewards success, lets states define their own standards, and fires teachers at failing schools (maybe).Conservatives continue to advance school choice, principally in promoting charter schools, public schools freed from some bureaucratic standards. Paul E. Peterson, in The...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/16/10 11:33 am ET

Howell Raines, Media Dinosaur

WE CONSERVATIVES have our little blind spots. One of them is that MSM journalists get it.In other words, when they go on and on about objective journalism and the horrors of Fox News they understand that, as the postmodernists say, they are reciting a narrative, a narrative that justifies their power.To run the kind of stories they run, to consistently bias towards the liberal point of view, as...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/15/10 11:30 am ET

The Rotation of Power

THE ESSENCE of governing is to let the other guys have a turn.My Greek friend George Maroutsos used to teach me the essence of democracy as it applied to Greece after the fall of the Greek colonels back in the 1970s. The point was to elect the left, then defeat them in duly constituted elections. The key is that, when defeated, the ruling party leaves office. And then the other party takes...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/12/10 11:06 am ET

Why ObamaCare is a Dem Donkey Trap

CONSERVATIVES and other opponents of ObamaCare have been flapping on about "consent of the governed" as the Democrats twist this way and that to get out of their box canyon.Michael Barone has just summed up the Dems' problem pretty well. So let's go with it. He writes of three cases to consider when trying to pass legislation:You can pass popular legislation on party-line votes, and you usually...

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| perm | comment(0) | 03/11/10 11:28 am ET

Conservatives as Reactionaries

LIBERALS JUST can't get enough of the idea that conservatives are reactionaries, trying to turn the clock back.So you would expect that the Wall Street Journal's tame liberal, Thomas Frank, would be eager to take a whack at the subject whenever he gets a convenient hook.Mostly though he is outraged that Glenn Beck hates college professor President Woodrow Wilson. OK, so Wilson vetoed prohibition...

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| perm | comment(1) | 03/10/10 11:41 am ET

By-the-numbers Conservatism | 03/09/10 11:27 am ET
Lack of Trust in Dem Congress | 03/08/10 11:23 am ET
Avoiding Conflict Avoidance | 03/05/10 11:36 am ET
Obama's Four Porkies | 03/04/10 11:33 am ET
The Consent of the Governed | 03/03/10 11:02 am ET
Canada's Housing Non-Meltdown | 03/02/10 11:28 am ET
Pelosi's Forced March Politics | 03/01/10 11:08 am ET
The New Stupid Party | 02/26/10 9:17 am ET
Science's Big Problem | 02/25/10 11:55 am ET
This is not Obama's Rubicon | 02/24/10 10:37 am ET
The Box-Canyon Presidency | 02/23/10 11:16 am ET
The Problem with Tax Cuts(2) | 02/22/10 11:22 am ET
The Trouble with Specifics(1) | 02/19/10 11:04 am ET

| March blogs | February blogs |

OPED

ObamaCare: Why the Rules Matter

BACK IN BUSH era it was Republicans that got fed up with the rules. Democrats in the US Senate were filibustering conservative judge nominees and Republicans had had enough of it. So they planned to change the rules in the Senate with the “nuclear option” that would allow an up or down vote on their judges with a bare 51 vote majority. Democrats like then-Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) were outraged at this chicanery, but the bipartisan Gang of 14 defused an explosive situation so that the judge nominations could go ...

| more | comment | 03/18/10

ObamaCare: Defeat or Repeal?

The big question for Americans is whether they are better off defeating the monstrosity of ObamaCare now or whether it is best to let the Democrats pass it and then work to repeal it, whether it takes a day or a decade. ...

| more | comment | 03/12/10

Science's Big Problem

The Back-pocket Manifesto

Liberals Say US Is Ungovernable. Again

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

TO THE UPPER CRUST, the nineteenth century was a never-ending worry. The old order was coming to an end, the cyclical world of agriculture and its wealth in land.... more

RMC BOOKS

RMC Book of the Day

Stark, Rodney, and Bainbridge, William Sims, A Theory of Religion

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

My Inflation Nightmare

liberal Michael Kinsley worries about inflation.

Dems reworking ObamaCare to get better score

the numbers aren't coming out right.

ramp up charter schools

Peter E. Peterson says that we need 50 percent charter schools to compete in the global economy

Obama's illusions of cost-control

Robert J. Samuelson tells it like it is on health care.

Do They Really Believe in Obamacare?

according to Michael G. Franc, a recent poll of lawmakers shows that Dems think ObamaCare helps them electorally, and GOP lawmakers think it helps them. Someone is wrong...

> more

CCWUD PROJECT

cruel . corrupt . wasteful
unjust . deluded

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king�s peace, the law of contract, and private property.