Using the 'Common Good' to harm the good of all

Using the 'Common Good' to harm the good of all
When its pointed out that what 'economic thinkers' mean by the 'Common Good', is bestowing privileges & benefits to some, at the expense of others, for the 'good' of the economy, their response is not to make a new effort in thinking from first principles to determine whether or not they've gone astray (from what?), but to diminish and discard everything that makes such thinking possible (metaphysics, causality, ethics, etc.), so as to carry on with their calculations without any inconvenient 'interference' from morality & virtue.

No doubt some of my xTweeters would reply "Well, that's just like your opinion, man", but sorry, no, it's the thinking of those who've brought about calamitous disasters of modern times by thinking as they do. For example, as I've noted often (such as here, and here, and here) the opinion of the 'common good' and 'greater good' that 'economic thinking' holds, is what was expressed by this Supreme Court Justice in 1837, that:

"While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and wellbeing of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation."

Does that meaningfully differ from what my xTweeters espouse? It's very much worth noting that this wording comes from Justice Joseph Taney in his ruling opinion for the Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge (1837), and on hearing that opinion for the case he'd just lost, the famed senator and constitutional lawyer Daniel Webster, observed that:

"That's the death of property rights."

, which was an assessment that was shared by one of the deans of American jurisprudence, Chancellor Kent, who soon afterwards wrote in The New York Review:

"...A gathering gloom is cast over the future. We seem to have sunk suddenly below the horizon, to have lost the light of the sun..."

The reason why these two remaining Founders felt such a sense of gloom at the time of the actual culmination of the 'Classical Liberal' era, was because they understood that once the 'common good' was able to be used to justify infringing upon the individual rights of ANYone, then that principled understanding of Individual Rights and Property that America had been founded upon and protected by, would be stripped away, which would leave no one with any more claim to their actions and possessions than what force they could physically muster to cling to them, while simultaneously reducing their 'rights' to only those privileges that 'those who know best' might deem useful to grant to them, in service to their idea of the 'common good'.

To act against Property Rights is to support slavery and oppose individual rights, which is what made it the core of Democrat policy before & after our Civil War.

Some might reply "Come on now Van, you exaggerate!", but the fact is that it was again that very same sentiment that Judge Taney was expressing a few decades later, in his majority opinion for the Dred Scott case (the spark that lit the fuse to our Civil War), in which he held that it was right and proper to deprive a particular man or group of men of those privileges enjoyed by others, when 'those who know best' judged that they should be enslaved for their own good, and for the 'greater good' of the community.

And for those who'd say 'Come on now Van! The Civil War changed all of that!', I must sadly point out that while the outcome of the Civil War removed the possibility of men being labeled as actual slaves under our Constitution, the ideas that Justice Taney was expressing have dominated our colleges since the early 1800s. Those Pro-Regressive ideals easily survived our Civil War, and they handily fought off their last substantive opposition from 'The Right' back in Calvin Coolidge's administration. Those same ideals were also seen to be very much alive & thriving in FDR's administration, as with the infamous Gold Clause Cases which outlawed 'the privilege' of owning Gold in 1938. At the conclusion of those cases, a sentiment was again expressed that was very similar to that of a century earlier, when after the court's opinion was read that FDR's actions had prevailed, Supreme Court Justice McReynolds, gloomily stated that:

"...this is Nero at his worst. The Constitution is gone..."

And no, you can't say 'well we're still here, so obviously they must've been wrong!', as what we are left with here today, is little or nothing like the world that Daniel Webster warned was fading away.

Consider that at Daniel Webster's time, there was as yet:

• No State Mandated Compulsory Education (and America had the highest literacy rate in the West)
• No Federal Dept of Education (created by Republicans in 1863, and re-elevated by Carter in the 1970s)
• No Civil Service Act entrenching a federal bureaucracy into continuous power
• No Federal Regulatory Agencies
• No Income Tax
• No FED
• No FBI, FDA, SEC, or any of the other hundreds of agencies that make up the Administrative State
• ...etc., etc., etc.,

The sentiment of 'the common good' that Daniel Webster warned of and that Justice McReynolds saw realized, has progressively spiraled around into utilitarian & 'economic thinking' gaining ever more power over individual rights & property rights each time it's been employed over the last century and a half, which has been particularly apparent in just the last couple decades with George W. Bush's "..."I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system...", and in the rights-busting legislation of Obamacare, pushed through for the benefit of '"30% of Americans are not covered by healthcare, what about them! Are they just out of luck?! Would you leave them to die on the sidewalk?!"', both of which very clearly demonstrate something else that Webster had warned us of:

" It may be very possible that good intentions do really sometimes exist when constitutional restraints are disregarded. There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters."

One question we should ask ourselves now is what 'Good' - common, greater, or otherwise - could be served by the abridgement (and so the abandonment) of that principle of Property which our Founders understood to be so fundamental to the understanding of Individual Rights, which our American system of liberty was founded upon? They fully understood that granting and permitting the exercise of such powers over those principles and rights would mean throwing open the doors to a government of total and unlimited power over its people - in what world can that be thought of as being for the 'common good', or can somehow aid in maintaining 'a more perfect union' in any meaningful way?

Given the obvious interest that these 'economic experts' have in labeling (and mislabeling) others, it seems only fair that when their revisionist efforts are used to retrofit our understanding, that it warrants our identifying and turning the label maker back upon them... but with what labels?:

• , as neo-liberals?
• , as neo-Americans?
• , as old-fashioned Marxists?
• , as neo-Marxists?

Whichever of those above you might think fits best, each contains technical differences in their positions that contradict the reasoning for them (by design) so that the labeled can easily deny the label.  IMHO they are better described, than labeled, as being Pro-Regressive. Ignore the inconsistencies that the reversal of orbit and orbited creates, and note what they consistently believe in common, that they have the expertise to redefine the common meaning of the 'Common Good', into meaning something that cannot be common to all.

Another fitting term to describe how the Pro-Regressives goes about routinely generating answers to kill off uncomfortable questions before they spread, is what an online friend, @ClassicalLiberal12 (but in a good way 😎), devised for such arbiters of political correctness: The Umpires of Reasonable Discourse (TURD).

An exceedingly important point that we'll see develop throughout this post, is that what we're looking at here is not simply an 'economic' matter, or a debatable matter of political policies and preferences, but a manner of thinking that implicitly defines what you are able to view as being real and true, and of the highest ethical importance concerning what you recognize as being Good - which I mean that in the sense of Right & Wrong, Good and Evil - and reducing that to mere technicalities and political positions, is a means of reducing you, and surreptitiously depriving you, of your humanity.

Whatever the case may be, any 'thinker' proposing to 'manage' or 'know' what they can have no realistic means of even compiling, let alone adequately identifying, is not actually engaged in thinking (as an effort to understand what is real and true), they're simply using positions as pretexts for rationalizing a justification for a particular ideological use of political power. Such actions are necessarily arbitrary and require the breaching of fundamental principles, heedless of any unforeseen consequences that will follow from them, and they take them on the basis of their intentions & aspirations for what they've decided is *best* for your and everyone else's life.

While such behavior tends to leave me either cursing quietly or momentarily speechless, Bastiat managed a more measured response, in his 'Conflict of Principles':

"Now, what astonishes and confounds me is that a publicist, a statesman, who sincerely holds an economical doctrine that runs so violently counter to other principles that are incontestable, should be able to enjoy one moment of calm or peace of mind."

This is an issue that should not be passed by without considering it carefully, as doing so practically ensures that it will be imposed by default. Look at the questions their answers are meant to kill:

• How should the Market [which is what?] be 'corrected '?
• What knowledge & understanding do they claim to possess that is superior to that which our nation was founded upon, and which these theories are derived from, and so justifies their employing them upon us?
• As agreed upon & decided by who?

• By popular vote?
• By law?
• By the decisions of TURD's?

• Upon what criteria and authority do they give their 'ok' to such power?
• And what has happened to their habits of thought, that they are able to leave such questions unasked and unanswered?

To adequately address those questions, we'll need to interrupt this post in order to take a short(ish) diversion into pre-modern philosophy's understanding of metaphysics, causality, and ethics, in order to realize that 'Economics' wasn't simply advanced to replace Political Economy with a new name, but to replace reality itself.