Saturday, December 1, 2012

What We Should Care About - Ideals Beyond Stuff


From at Bruce Walker at americanthinker.com
When our interest in government is really an interest in prosperity, then we risk losing everything, including prosperity, although that is the slightest of the losses.  We really don't need more stuff.  Our greatest health problems today are not hunger or overwork, but rather overeating and boredom.  The aching emptiness in our body politic is not material poverty, but a poverty of honor and moral purpose.  Not only are we Americans not poor, but even relatively poor Americans live better today than affluent Americans did in 1950.
This does not mean that we are wrong for wanting the latest model car or the nicest home or the best new smartphone, but it does mean that the more we focus just on the financial impact of leftism, the more we will think like the very folks who are so horribly wrong.  The horror of socialism is not that it hurts the economy.  The horror of socialism is that it lusts for the wealth created by the productive and the demonization of these people as a prelude to confiscatory tax rates...
Our republic was constructed around ideals out of which, on balance, many good things would probably follow, but vitally those ideals should be followed whatever the impact on society as a whole because these ideals are, per se, good and noble.  This is even more imperative when our material wants are already largely sated.  Our battle is not, and must not be, simply a battle for stuff.  If it is, then we have lost the battle even when we win.

Read it all here...

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