Fishlore
Silver Member
There is quite a gap between the consensus will of the people and the policies and laws encacted by the federal government; however, this gap was created in the beginning and has been maintained ever since by the right, not the left.Your phrasing "if the government chooses" reflects a fundamental misperception. The government is not a person who choses, it is an institution which operates by legal programming created by elected representatives. The government does not have a mind of its own, it is a mechanism not a person.To "own" something is to exercise a right of possession. The critical point in our discussion is that the right of possession is (like all rights) not absolute. You own your car but it can be taken away if you don't make the payments. That ownership is subject to a lien, so is a home mortgage.
The government can take away your property, condemning it as a public health hazard or seizing it by eminent domain if it is needed for some public purpose. The government can seize your property if you don't pay your taxes. The government can take your money in fines or taxes. The reason for this is "sovereignty" the power of the government over the individual. Since government has a monopoly on force, all governments have sovereignty.
The government can also take your liberty, draft you into the army, even take your life. That is true in a dictatorship as well as in a democracy. It is what governments do. There is a cute idea that citizens have "unalienable" rights to things like life and liberty but, obviously, that unalienability has never applied where sovereign government is concerned. Just ask George Washington.
There was, for a brief while in the 18th century, an idea that people had rights before they had government. This was part of a speculative theory about the "state of nature" and origins of human society. The modern sciences of anthropology and archeology have proven conclusively that this notion of "rights" is just a myth. Rights are socially constructed. All primates have societies with social rules and norms. Monkeys have government. It's older than humanity. Get over it.
And if the government chooses to not take your property but instead allows you to keep it, do you consider this to be redistribution?
The mechanism of government runs on money. The government gets its money from various sources, mostly through taxes, and spends its money on the items described in the federal budget. This activity is inherently redistributive. Can you think of something the government does which does not involve taking money from one source and transferring it somewhere else?
The left is nothing more than a force of pure authoritarianism. It generally believes that the government can do whatever it wants with the people. It chooses not to take our stuff...it chooses not to kill us...it chooses not to rape us and sell our daughters into white slavery....blah blah blah. Why even have democracy if it can do whatever it wants to the people without their consent?
The first step was the 3/5 rule, designed to secure disproportionate congressional power for the Southern slave-owning class. It was followed by the Electoral College, the rules of the House and Senate, the structure of the two-party system and dozens of other features great and small which create barriers between what the majority of citizens want and what goverment does.
It is the Republican Party which depends on the barriers these days. When 90% of the people want universal background checks for gun purchases and no bill is brought before the House by the Republican Speaker, the situation becomes obvious.