Are Americans Fit to be Trusted?

'A century before Bloomberg’s soda war, Theodore Roosevelt stood in New York City’s Carnegie Hall and delivered one of his most famous speeches, which began with the words, “The great fundamental issue now before the Republican party and before our people can be stated briefly. It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves?”

The answer of the liberal technocrats, the Bloombergs and Obamas, is a chorus of jeers. They make it clear with their policies that they believe that the American people are unfit to govern themselves in matters great or small.

If the American is unfit to be trusted with a soda cup or a gun or a lawn dart or *oil* ..any of a thousand other things taken away from him for his own good, then how can he be trusted with the ballot box? That mistrust, more than any single abuse, reveals the scowling tyrant behind the smiling face, the Lenin in every H.G. Wells, the totalitarian face behind every liberal mask. The soft totalitarianism of the public interest technocracy is a tyranny that seeks to destroy the rule of the people and replace it with the rule of the left. And what socialism, progressivism, communism and other ideologies of the left have in common; is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat or by force.

The creeping pace of the soft revolution forces the inner totalitarian to practice some discretion, mummifying his tyrannical aspirations in the embalming fluid of political correctness, but no flood of words can conceal the inner contempt behind the false benevolence of the tyrant who seeks to make and makes policies that deprive the people of their freedom for their own good.'