The State's Interest

A bit of Kirk for Sunday reading.  Herein he explains (in advance) the reason that the Obamunists have attacked the Catholic Church's 1st Amendment rights.

"All history, and especially modern history, is in some sense the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss. In this process, the rise of the modern State has been by far the most powerful influence. ‘The single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has been the rise and development of decentralized territorial state.’ 

....What the state seeks is a tableland upon which a multitude of individuals, solitary though herded together, labor anonymously for the State’s maintenance. Universal military conscription and the ‘mobile labor force’ and the concentration–camp are only the more recent developments of the system. The ‘pulverizing macadamizing tendency of modern history’ which Maitland discerned is been brought to pass, in large part, by ‘the momentous conflicts of jurisdiction between the political State and the social associations line intermediate to it and the individual.’ The same processes may be traced in the history of Greece and of Rome; and the consequence, in the long run, was social ennui and political deaths. All those great gifts of variety, contrast, competition, communal pride, and sympathetic association which characterize man at his manliest are menaced by the ascendancy of the omnicompetent state, resolved for its own security to level the ramparts of traditional community.”

Not that the Obamunists were first; one traces Statism back through Bush II, Clinton, Bush I, and (especially) FDR, but its roots lie faintly in Lincoln, with amplification by TR and Wilson.  To a great extent this course is abetted by the 17th Amendment, which neutered State Governments (another intermediary).

It is Benthamism/Utilitarianism run amok.  Ironically, Benthamism and its fellow-traveler (Adam Smith's doctrine of self-interest, the grandfather of Ayn Rand's hero) join hands to demolish intermediaries--and empower the State.


Simple-minded screeds promoting Statism-in-the-name-of-charity are not helpful.  There is a balance-point which can be found with the use of prudence.  But prudence is not part of the makeup of Leftists.