Liberals Can’t Count To 10

– or: Why Has Progressivism Been Taken Over By Busybodies?

The 10th Commandment:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.

 

The 10th Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

 

Both 10th, both ignored by the Left.

Coincidence?

Perhaps not.

Perhaps they got distracted before they got to number 10 – this is the era of sound bites and Twitter. Or, perhaps they were counting on their fingers, and being overgrown babies they had their thumbs stuck in their mouths. Or elsewhere.

Levity aside, the root cause herein is an inability or disinterest in living one’s own life without judging, assessing, interfering with or comparing to the lives of others. It is simultaneously the reason that modern liberalism is incompatible with individual liberty and the reason it is so persistent and enduring. Consider what the wealth of our society provides individuals: free time and disposable income. The incredibly high productivity we have created over decades and centuries of economic progress means that we have to work fewer hours every day and every year to provide for the basics of food, clothing and shelter. Even the poor enjoy standards of living that far exceed those of the middle classes of developing nations, and even the poor exist on a level FAR above subsistence. If you consider the economic stratum of the chattering classes, it’s obvious that they have ample “leisure” time – time that needn’t be devoted to productive work. Since nature abhors a vacuum, that leisure time will be filled by some sort of activity.

Some people will work more. Some will pursue hobbies. Some will get involved with charities or nonprofits. Some will do “nothing,” which in modern language means sitting in front of the television, playing video games, etc. And some will get to wondering about their neighbors and what they’re up to. We don’t need to analyze the evolutionary or societal roots of nosiness and the tendency to be a “busybody” to know they exist in many people. When we couple this tendency with a belief set that subordinates individual liberty to the collective good, we get the behavior of the modern liberal.

It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that the fact that the Left isn’t in favor of a more federalist approach, i.e. live within and work on the blue states and leave the red states to wallow in whatever it is they want to wallow in, is a mistake and an overreach. They could likely accomplish so much more of their agenda if they didn’t have to deal as much with the people who don’t want what they’re selling and if those people had the ability to “escape” to a state that’s more attuned to their beliefs. Doing so would, of course, risk allowing evidence that their ideas aren’t the brilliant end-all to society’s problems to arise. More importantly, it would allow some people to live in a fashion the liberals find distasteful, and there’s the problem. Haters gotta hate, busybodies gotta be busy, and the nosy need places to insert their probosces.

Still, if the statists could manage to dial down the geographic magnitude of their statism, they might find themselves in a happier place. If they could have their Northeast and California, their Seattle and San Francisco and New York, and just let the ignorant unwashed in other places suffer without their guiding hand, maybe they wouldn’t be quite so angry.

I do suppose the smarter ones may have figured out that this won’t work out as intended. Detroit, Stockton and other failed municipalities are proof of that. If people who don’t want to be “liberaled” have places to go that the liberals have washed their hands of, they might actually do it. Eventually, the takers run out of people to take from, and are saddled with too many people to give to. On the other hand, maybe they haven’t figured this out, despite the overwhelming evidence in front of them. Maybe they haven’t bothered to think it through, despite all the free time they could devote to introspection and rational analysis. After all, have you ever heard of a busybody who was logically argued out of that mind set?

We can safely assume that many who ignore the 10th Commandment don’t put much stock in Mosaic law (they’re not Judeo-Christian), or simply pick and choose which of the Commandments are “good ones” and which can be ignored or dismissed as obsolete (they dabble in religion). The latter attitude is directly applicable to the Bill of Rights, as well, as demonstrated by the Left’s dismissal of 2, 9, 10 and parts of 5 (at least). Yet in the case of the 10th Commandment, the underlying principle isn’t one that can be dismissed as incorrect or backwards. Imagine someone trying to justify and extol the virtues of jealousy and covetousness. The Left decries “greed” all the time when discussing bankers, the world of finance, and the wealthy in general. The greediness of statist politicians and the liberals that put them into office isn’t referred to as such, or in similar terms. The use of words like “fairness,” “safety nets,” “helping the disadvantaged and poor,” and so forth are strong evidence that covetousness is a trait they want to hide, mask, rename and keep others from noticing. They may ignore the 10th Commandment, but they don’t disavow or contradict it.

For sport, we can challenge those who covet the possessions of others “for the public good” by asking them if they find that sort of greed seemly. It may be about all the satisfaction that’s available to us nowadays.