| Mr Khan said: In measured doses, more centralization and control does good things for a society, so long as this control does not undermine certain inalienable rights in the process, but the need for vigilence against overreach should not take the form of an entity whose rallying cry is "get yer guvmint hands off my medicare," nor an entity that enshrines avarice and believes in the inherent evil of the public sector. Accountability is important, but we shouldn't give in to the idea that we should restore a variant of anarchy just because it sounds easier than working to hold the government accountable. |
The idea that people are going to be able to hold the government accountable as it grows and grows and grows is mere fantasy. Most people are already politically disengaged and completely uninformed, and aren't in a position to hold anyone accountable. And this growth and increased centralization does invariably undermine individual rights. Every day the Democrats seem to turn over a rock and find a new right underneath it, and these "rights" are never of the negative sort but always of the positive, affirmative variety. (See: the "right" to free contraception.) But of course nobody can be entitled to anything that they can't provide for themselves without someone else being forced to provide it for them, and one of the left's biggest problems - even among the few who are truly mindful of civil liberties, like Glenn Greenwald - is that they see economic freedom as somehow divorced from personal liberty when they're actually inseparable. And, of course, there's the fact that when you find health care to be an inalienable right, when a bunch of people are big fat asses, it's no longer their problem; it's our problem. This necessitates (read: gives an excuse for) the government to step in and regulate... well, everything. (To tie this back into pseudo-intellectualism and the frequent silliness of academia, there's this study which concludes that a penny per pound tax on soft drinks would prevent 2,600 premature deaths per year by causing the average adult to consume a whopping 9 fewer calories per day. Nine.)
That you think the Tea Party advocates a variant of anarchy (and presumably is stupid for doing so) while the Democrats are Very Smart People for screaming bloody murder about cutting the growth of spending as some sort of draconian austerity measure kind of says it all about why you see anti-intellectualism as existing predominately on the right: it's not anti-intellectual when your side does it.
