http://themoderatevoice.com/52460/are-you-out-o…

What do you imagine that looking like at the scale of national politics? A 300-million-man march on Washington, where we all converge and discover we agree on everything, and we just enact our consensus into law?

Of course it can't work like that. Citizens don't agree on everything and can't get directly involved in every issue that affects them. So they inevitably come together in smaller groups first–such as the ACLU, or labor unions, or for-profit companies, or the Mormon church–to represent one slice of their interests in politics and elsewhere. Those groups incorporate, and government is inevitably an arena where corporations duke it out.

I share your concern that this system produces bad decisions, I just don't think the system could work differently even in principle.

I'm not surprised that the key exploitation of children, Stark's lying to the public about paying for health care “reform,” was neglected, either through true negligence or out of dishonesty or more warpiness.

Corporatism is a system of economic, political, and social organization where corporate groups such as business, ethnic, farmer, labour, pharmaceutical, military, insurance, patronage, or religious groups are joined together into a single governing body in which the different groups are mandated to negotiate with each other to establish policies in the interest of the multiple groups within the body.

Large businesses obviously have a pony in the health care reform circus, but they're far from the whole show. We will not be reforming the tax laws that keep health insurers in power because labor unions will not have it. We will keep going with wasteful CYA medicine because trial lawyers–not one big corporation, but associations of small practitioners–cannot abide tort reform. We will restrict medicare reform to lip service about efficiency improvement, lest our seniors blog and vote our leaders into unemployment.

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings.
–Thomas Jefferson

[We in America entertain] a due sense of our equal right to… the acquisitions of our own industry.
–Thomas Jefferson

That, on the principle of a communion of property, small societies may exist in habits of virtue, order, industry, and peace, and consequently in a state of as much happiness as Heaven has been pleased to deal out to imperfect humanity, I can readily conceive, and indeed, have seen its proofs in various small societies which have been constituted on that principle. But I do not feel authorized to conclude from these that an extended society, like that of the United States or of an individual State, could be governed happily on the same principle
–Thomas Jefferson

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.
–Thomas Jefferson

[The] rights [of the people] to the exercise and fruits of their own industry can never be protected against the selfishness of rulers not subject to their control at short periods.
–Thomas Jefferson

Our wish… is that… equality of rights [be] maintained, and that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.
–Thomas Jefferson

To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association–'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.
–Thomas Jefferson

If the overgrown wealth of an individual is deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature, while extra-taxation violates it.
–Thomas Jefferson

[If government have] a right of demanding ad libitum and of taxing us themselves to the full amount of their demand if we do not comply with it, [this would leave] us without anything we can call property.
–Thomas Jefferson

The first foundations of the social compact would be broken up were we definitely to refuse to its members the protection of their persons and property while in their lawful pursuits
–Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson would most certainly disown “The Party of Jefferson” were he alive today.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
–James Madison

Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.
–James Madison

According to this standard of merit, the praise of affording a just securing to property, should be sparingly bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect them in the enjoyment and communication of their opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the estimation of some, a more valuable property.
–James Madison

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest. A magistrate issuing his warrants to a press gang, would be in his proper functions in Turkey or Indostan, under appellations proverbial of the most compleat despotism.
–James Madison

A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species: where arbitrary taxes invade the domestic sanctuaries of the rich, and excessive taxes grind the faces of the poor; where the keenness and competitions of want are deemed an insufficient spur to labor, and taxes are again applied, by an unfeeling policy, as another spur; in violation of that sacred property, which Heaven, in decreeing man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, kindly reserved to him, in the small repose that could be spared from the supply of his necessities.
–James Madison

If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.
–James Madison

The “Father of the Constitution” would look at the current government in power with absolute horror.

Prof, when I say “capitalism”, I'm talking about capitalism run amok… a state the founders would hardly have approved of.

The US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence drew heavily on John Locke you know, and Locke was all about property rights.

From Wiki

Locke uses the word property in both broad and narrow senses. In a broad sense, it covers a wide range of human interests and aspirations; more narrowly, it refers to material goods. He argues that property is a natural right and it is derived from labor.
Locke believed that ownership of property is created by the application of labor. In addition, property precedes government and government cannot “dispose of the estates of the subjects arbitrarily.” Karl Marx later critiqued Locke's theory of property in his social theory.

I

Compare these two items, first the Declaration of Independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Now from the earlier (1693) Concerning Civil Government second esay by Locke:

Secondly: I answer, such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the end for which government was at first erected…

'll take Locke and the founding fathers over Karl Marx,whom the founding fathers did not draw from in forging our nation, The founding fathers most certainly would NOT have approved of today's Nanny State.

All mankind… being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.
–John Locke

Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.
–John Locke

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property.
–John Locke

Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.
-John Locke

“Fascism” Vince??? Time for you to get your dictionary. You're wayyy off the mark.

Knew that for a while

> who are in the thrall of capitalism's own bowl movement

Capitalism? Hardly. What we got now is Fascism. State-control of industry. It's been the Govt that has been failing the market.

It's a mystery to me too. JSpencer and cohorts seem unable to distinguish capitalism and corporatism in a line-up, so they habitually hang the wrong suspect and let the real perpetrator go free.

I feel like this country has been raped/.. or mutated.

This is not the United States any more. The American Revolution has been defeated.

* Yes I know it still has to go to Senate and the Conference and to the President