Here 'we' go again

Mainstream statist columnist Ellen Goodman has sound advice for John Kerry today - DON'T RUN FOR PRESIDENT! - and also a succinct summary of what she thinks the Democrat wing of the Big Government Party ought to be shooting for in the 2008 election. Of course, it is also a succinct summary of what the Republican wing of the Big Government Party likely believes it should shoot for.

"What the Democrats need this time out is not a messenger honed to squeak on the margin of undecideds, but a vision of what's gone wrong and how to right it. As Michael Tomasky writes in The American Prospect, they need a liberal message of the common good that trumps the conservative message - a view that we are in this globalized, post-industrial, post-9/11 world together and must ''pull together, make some sacrifices, and, just sometimes, look beyond our own interests to solve our problems and create the future.'"

Because really, folks, can't you just hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Snow standing up and saying, "We need a conservative message of the common good that trumps the liberal message - a view that we are in this globalized, post-industrial, post-9/11 world together and must pull together, make some sacrifices, and, just sometimes, look beyond our own interests to solve our problems and create the future"?

In fact, isn't that just exactly the reasoning that has been used over the years to justify the dissolution of the basic principles the founders laid down for this "more perfect union" of "free and independent states"? Haven't we lowly subjects of the Empire been asked, for the greater good, to look beyond the selfish desire to be left alone to live our lives in privacy free from the entanglements and threats of government violence on our persons and property? Hasn't the ruling class made a cottage industry of defining for us the conditions under which "we" will pull together, "we" will make some sacrifices, "we" will solve our problems and the nature of the future "we" will create?

What I need is for the people who aim to run my life to back off. What I need is an end to the preposterous belief that a central government can serve the "common good" of 50 small republics and 300 million people, and a dethroning of those who presume to define the meaning of such "common good" under the umbrella of what "we" want and/or need.

But, in the end, I understand that for now my view is a minority, and that I live in a country where an unsuspecting majority embrace the idea that government exists to run their lives under the illusion of making them fat, sassy and secure. In the immortal words of Joss Whedon, who put them into the mouth of Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: "I got no need to beat you; I just want to go my way." (And then followed with the eternal words of Big Government: "And you can do that, once you" do as we command.)

I'd march to the polls like a good little statist soldier for a candidate who could deliver on a promise to let us all go our way. No such candidate is anywhere to be seen.