People should not fear their government, their government should fear the people

"People should not fear their government, their government should fear the people"

Democratic pollsters Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen reflect on polling data about Obamacare and the broader issue of government intrusion into the private sphere:

[A] solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data.

Yet, the Democrats seem bound and determined to ram Obamacare down our throats no matter what the cost.

It's no wonder people are scared of their government. Back to Caddell and Schoen:

[T]he country is moving away from big government, with distrust growing more generally toward the role of government in our lives. Scott Rasmussen asked last month whose decisions people feared more in health care: that of the federal government or of insurance companies. By 51 percent to 39 percent, respondents feared the decisions of federal government more. This is astounding given the generally negative perception of insurance companies.


CNN found last month that 56 percent of Americans believe that the government has become so powerful it constitutes an immediate threat to the freedom and rights of citizens. When only 21 percent of Americans say that Washington operates with the consent of the governed, as was also reported last month, we face an alarming crisis.

Sadly, all this is brought to us by the so-called Party of Jefferson. In fact, for all his faults, Jefferson recognized that "the movement from simplicity to complexity [and] from freedom to regimentation creates a psychology and an institutionalism that conducts straight to the leviathan state, controlled by a ruling caste, serving the demands of exploitation, heedless of the well-being of the regimented mass."

And yet, Jefferson's supposed political descendants celebrate because they think we're going to continue down the road towards a Bismarkian nanny state that runs our lives from cradle to grave (at best):

When people look back from 2060 on the creation of the American welfare state, they’ll say that FDR, LBJ, and BHO were its main architects, with Roosevelt enshrining the principle of universal social insurance into law and Obama completing the initial promise of the New Deal.

I'm afraid Yglesias might be right, except for one thing. Obamcare isn't a completion. It's a camel's nose. Or should I say, Leviathan's nose?

I vehemently disagree with the methods of V, from whom I've taken the titular quote. But the quote is a paraphrase of a much older one from none other than Thomas Jefferson himself:

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

It's time to make the statists in Washington fear for their jobs. Scott Brown's win was a good start. Now we need to double down in November.

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2010/03/government-should-fear-the-people-not-the-other-way-around.html