Tuesday, December 15, 2015

The coercive power of the state

California's Jerry Brown says coercive power in the hands of the state is a wonderful thing, a force for good.

We've apparently forgotten how Europe's fascism thrived on coercion, and how its coercion was initially billed as a force for good.  State coercion was also woven into the fabric of heavy-handed Communist states.

We travel a perilous path that's highly predictable through the lens of history. And we seem to now enter a phase in this journey where "progressives" dare tout expanding government coercion as exclusively a good thing.

Perhaps we'd best recall the time tested observations of Lord Acton:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

No comments:

Post a Comment