Month: December 2021

EBENEZER SCROOGE WAS A RADICAL LIBERTARIAN

If Ebenezer Scrooge were a real person and lived in the United States of today he would be a Republican.

Politically, I am an Independent voter, which means I vote for the individual I believe is the right person, with the right ideas and the right vision to lead in the moment, irrespective of party affiliation, whether at the local, state or federal levels. However, lately I have been voting for Democrats.

The reason is that I believe democrats align more today with traditional American principles and values enshrined in our founding documents. For example, I believe government is formed to serve the people, not the other way around, and government is ‘of, by and for’ the people. In other words, we are the government. I believe that government is necessary in order to guarantee that all citizens are afforded and guaranteed certain God-given ‘inalienable rights’.

These include ‘equality for all under the law’, and ‘the right to life’, that in turn facilitates ‘the pursuit of happiness’, which is the goal of every human being on earth. Inherent to life and to happiness is the right to health care. Health care is nothing more than the means through which we protect our health. For the simple reason that without health protection there is neither life nor happiness.

This does not mean that government must be the sole providers and guardians of health, far from it. It only means that government should guarantee all citizens have equal access to the protection of their health. The notion that government per se is inherently evil is fundamentally an un-American idea, and wrongheaded.

Therefore, I categorically reject the lie that because Democrats support programs that promote the physical, mental and economic well-being of its citizens such as retirement benefits, unemployment insurance, medicaid and medicare, public education, and other programs that seek to serve the ‘common good’, that Dems are surreptitiously promoting and seeking communist rule. This is absurd, on its face.

Unfortunately, the Republican conservative Party of today and its economic principles has become the party of radical Libertarianism. What is radical libertarianism? Charles Dickens described it best in his novel, ‘A Christmas Carol’ in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. It assumes that humans are wired only to be selfish or as some may call it, rugged individualists; It is an idea borrowed from Darwinism or Natural Selection, the survival of the fittest. It posits that every human being is in competition with each other. The aim being to elevate himself above all others, the individual uber alles. The ultimate rat race. When, in fact, acting in pro of fostering the common good is the height of human evolution.

We owe this sad state of affairs within the Republican Party, not to Trump. This libertarian movement preceeded Trump. He merely embraced it for political expediency. The real architects of the Libertarian movement in the United States are the Multi-billionaire Koch Brothers and their network of wealthy donors, who are also responsible for The Tea Party movement and in turn the Freedom Caucus. We must reject it or else we will become an oligarchy, not comminist but a government ruled by, for and of the wealthy. Think Russia!