Whether or not our founding fathers had my "givers" vs "takers" paradigm in mind (I rather doubt it), they could hardly have devised better barometers for which end of the spectrum a government honored than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While these tendencies may be difficult to measure objectively, a perceptive and thoughtful person can see in which direction any government proposal or policy tends- toward these goals, or away from them. More importantly, the perceptive and thoughtful person can tell the difference between the SYMBOLIC striving toward these goals, the the ACTUAL striving toward them.
For instance, War is the enemy of life, of liberty and of happiness. Hence, one cannot achieve these aims by way of war. They can only be attained by ENDING war. NOW - if an aggessor is making war against one, then the way to END that war is to remove the will or the ability of the aggressor to pursue it. This may mean ending a war by winning it. This would almost universally be the case in a shooting war. Ideological wars are a whole different kettle of fish and, being fought in the mind, cannot be "won." They can only be ended by removing the will to fight them. So to make war with the aim of creating "democracy" is intellectually dishonest.
Note that "democracy" is neither a measurement, nor an aim expressed in the Declaration of Independence, nor does it appear in our Constitution. We are not a direct democracy, though we vote. Frequently we do not even vote directly for a candidate, but rather for delegates or electors who will support our candidate, and we rarely vote on laws. Our representatives write the laws and vote on them. We have adopted a system of representative self-rule wherein citizens seek to select those who seem to most closely resemble our selves in terms of which plans, which ideals, and which values we would like to have access to, and to see reflected in our government. Sometimes we err.
Why?
Sometimes it's because we fall for the symbol of a thing rather than the thing itself. We fall for orthodoxy dressed up as "Patriotism." We fall for intolerance and punitive impulses dressed up as "right to life." Why is this symbolic rather than real? a) because it is founded in faith rather than fact - there is no science which says when life begins, so the holding that it begins at conception is purely faith-based, no more and no less. Those who would legislate a "right to life" enforce their belief system on us. b) It is utterly disingenuous. These same advocates have no problem with the death penalty for the most part. Cause an unwanted child to be born, deny it social and support services, allow it to be raised by parents (or A parent) who never wanted it, wait until it grows up to be so poorly socialized as to resort to a life of crime, then kill it once it's grown. Unborn life is much cheaper and easier to protect and support than unwanted life. Once the little beggar is born, it's on its own. (Because, after all, Big Government, as embodied in social programs, is Evil.) We fall for economic policy which rewards the rich and penalizes the poor, dressed up as "free enterprise." We fall for defacto discrimination dressed up as "equal treatment." We fall for hollow and intellectually bankrupt educational policy, dressed up as "no child left behind."
But usually because we are deceived. Politicians lie. It is natural they would do so, because they seek control. Those who are elected have their hands on the REAL levers of power, and they would not seek office if they did not desire that control. And what is a lie? It is a control mechanism. I don't care who it is, or under what circumstances, if someone is lying to you, they are trying to control you. They seek to remove the power and control over your own actions from you, and appropriate it to themselves. An example would be the false mailer Clinton put out in NH on the eve of the primary there. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of women read it, believed it, and acted not according to what THEY would have wished had they known the truth, but rather as the Clinton campaign wished them to act. When they learned they had been deceived, many were furious. Others accepted this as justifiable in the heat of a campaign. These others are in the thrall of bigger, more persistent lies. Another control mechanism is fear. You can control the direction a person will move by injecting fear. They will move away from that which they now fear, and toward that which is offered as a safe haven. As politics is almost always linear (that is, one is moving this way or that), one of the simplest and most powerful lies one can tell is that the voter must FEAR, and that you offer a safe haven from that which you have told them to fear.
As a voter, the only way to be in control is to be in possession of the truth. "Givers," will promulgate truth, make truth accessible to you, and illuminate truth. "Takers" will lie, hide, misdirect, tell you to fear, and in any and every other way seek to control your movements against your better judgment. In the end, they will hold power, and you will be left holding the check.
Concluding thoughts on this line, in my next post.
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