Fleeing From Utopia...

I hope that this blog will largely be about forgotten little quirks of the law and oddities that I have found. I expect that it will also become a commentary upon how a law system once easily enough understood by the common man has become a behemoth requiring you to consult someone with a 3 year post-college degree to engage in even the most routine transaction. However, I will likely touch on politics often enough that the reader should know where I stand.

The modern Conservative believes in the interconnection of free markets, private property, religion, tradition, authority, representative government, separation of powers, natural rights and ordered liberty. He is responsible for seeing to his own well being, the well being of his family and as a citizen to contribute to the well being of the community through volunteerism and good works. These concepts, developed through the human experience, promote The Civil Society.

The modern Liberal believes in the supremacy of the state (nation), as opposed to the classical Liberal who opposed authoritarian regimes in favor of personal freedom. Thus the modern Liberal is more appropriately now named the modern Statist. To the modern Statist, the imperfection of the individual and the allowance of personal pursuits via liberty impede the creation of the Utopian state.

The Statist's Utopia can and has taken many forms throughout history but all have the same flaw: that the Statist misuses the concept of equality.

The Founding Fathers (and by extension, the modern Conservative) understood equality to be the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor and the leverage of his individual property, and to be treated impartially before a just law.

The Statist uses the claim of creating 'equality' to pursue uniform economic and social outcomes at the expense of self-government, individual property rights and individual liberty. Further, he believes that he can tame man's natural state of imperfection and through man's perfection can Utopia be achieved.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. (C.S. Lewis). The Statist attempts to deconstruct The Civil Society and instead offers the tyranny of authoritarianism. They talk of individual rights, but promote collectivism. They talk of enfranchisement and suffrage, but promote judicial and administrative usurpation of the representative state. They talk of workers' rights but promote the heavy taxation and regulation of labor. This is not liberty.

The Statist portrays Utopia as a kind of heaven on earth, but has a high tolerance for the widespread hell of Statist-caused misery, believing it is the price humanity must pay to pave the way for Utopia, or believing that Statist caused misery is due to misapplication of Utopian ideals, poor performance of a particular regime or nefarious doings of perceived "enemies of the state."

The modern Conservative recognizes that equality is the equal opportunity before God, man and the law of the individual to prove unequal talent. He also recognizes the double meaning from the Greek that Utopia is both the good place and no place, for it does not exist. Nevertheless, the modern Conservative finds himself Fleeing From Utopia.

[Some concepts and language borrowed from Mark Levin's essays contained in Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. 2009]