{"id":9471,"date":"2012-08-10T12:31:50","date_gmt":"2012-08-10T12:31:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/08\/10\/did-the-state-make-you-great\/"},"modified":"2012-08-10T12:31:50","modified_gmt":"2012-08-10T12:31:50","slug":"did-the-state-make-you-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2012\/08\/10\/did-the-state-make-you-great\/","title":{"rendered":"Did the State Make You Great?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Krauthammer<\/a> 'nails it' brilliantly (emphasis added):<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(One quibble: Krauthammer's "product of society" is too strong. But even the great stumble on occasion.)<\/span><\/p>\n

How can Obama be so stupid that he doesn't understand the above?  And how could we be so(collectively) stupid as to have elected  the incompetent?  (Don't blame me: I held my nose and voted for the effete and superannuated McCain.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Obama commits a grotesque straw man fallacy when he imputes to conservatives and libertarians the view that each of us pulled himself up by his own bootstraps ex nihilo<\/em>.  That goes hand-in-glove with a fallacy of false alternative: either you did it all on your own, or government did it for you.  As Krauthammer in effect points out, the institutions of civil society are neither the creation of the individual nor government agencies.<\/span> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Krauthammer 'nails it' brilliantly (emphasis added): To say that all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the … Continue reading “Did the State Make You Great?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-social-and-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}