Excerpt: Ideals & Dangers

On the Ideals and Dangers of Liberalism:
Any government with the power to mother its citizens also has the power to dominate them and steal from them:  to overtax them, confiscate their property and override their binding agreements.  For this reason, the legally enforceable institutions of society must be very limited, lest the government charged with protecting the people against tyranny and theft becomes itself the most dangerous tyrant and thief.

Under the creed of modern liberalism, the individual citizen is not called to maturity but is instead invited to begin a second childhood. Like the child at play, he is given, or at least promised, ultimate economic, social and political security without having to assume responsibility for himself. The liberal agenda requires him to remain in an artificial environment--the daycare program of the grandiose state--where he need not become an adult, take responsibility for his own welfare, nor cooperate with others to achieve what the state will give him for nothing.

The architecture of responsible liberty is sacrificed in modern liberalism's determination to conscript all persons into a grand socialist collective, a great corps of mutual servants, subjects and surrogate parents under the rule of liberal government.

This book has argued that with good enough childrearing in a culture committed to ordered liberty, the natural thrust of human development produces an individual who is at once autonomous and mutual, a self-reliant source of initiative and voluntary collaboration in the activities of everyday life.  This book has also argued that the modern liberal agenda's collective causes have undermined the rights of the individual and his growth to adult competence; undermined the integrity of the family as the primary civilizing and socializing entity in society; and undermined the proper function of a modern society, that of providing an overarching social structure for lives to be lived in peace and freedom.  Modern liberalism has achieved these destructive results through relentless rhetorical, legislative and judicial attacks on the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual; on the natural human tendencies toward cooperation, mutuality and altruism; and on the principles of moral realism distilled over centuries of western civilization.  The liberal agenda has fostered government dependency instead of self-reliance; government direction instead of self-determination; moral indulgence and relativism instead of moral rectitude; coercive collectivism instead of cooperative individualism; indentured servitude instead of genuine altruism.  In favor of various collective causes, modern liberalism has succeeded in displacing the individual from his rightful position as the primary economic, social and political unit of society.  It has undermined the sanctity of marriage and the cohesiveness of the family.  It has undermined the natural harmony that exists between individual, family and community.  It has weakened the obligations of promises, contracts, ownership and property rights.  It has disconnected rewards from merit and desert.  It has corrupted the moral and ethical basis for civilized living.  It has polarized the population into warring classes with false claims of victimization and villainy and contrived needs for political rescue.  With enormous growth beyond the definition of government and its functions set forth in the U.S. Constitution, modern American liberalism has created the idealized parental and administrative state and endowed it with vast managerial, caretaking and regulatory powers.  History records the inevitable result of such expansions of government power:  individual liberty and the peaceful coordination of human action are severely compromised or lost altogether. 

The liberal agenda is the liberal neurosis made manifest.  It is not a rational program for the organization of human action.  It is instead an irrational conglomeration of neurotic defenses which the modern liberal uses for his mental and emotional equilibrium.  By attacking the sovereignty of the individual and the institutions essential to ordered liberty, the agenda attacks the very foundations of a free society.  In fact, modern liberalism does not seek authentic freedom, despite its historical association with that ideal, nor does it foster the individual's growth to competence.  It does not promote the virtues of individual liberty:  not self-reliance, responsibility, dependability or accountability; not cooperation by consent or initiative or industry; not high moral standards or caring or altruism.  It does not seek a society of sovereign citizens, but fosters instead a society of allegedly victimized dependents under the custodial care of the state.  In keeping with its origins in early childhood, the liberal agenda endorses self-indulgence through short-term hedonism and primitive impulse gratification.  In keeping with its ethic of injustice collecting, the agenda seeks ever increasing government regulation to defeat alleged villains, and ever increasing levels of unearned compensation, reparation and restitution to compensate alleged victims.  In keeping with its secular tradition, modern liberalism attacks the legitimacy of formal religion, dismisses its historical importance and denies its critical role in maintaining the nation's moral integrity.