[MD] A Place for the Principled Person

[Ham Priday]

Case --


> Help me out here Ham, are you saying that because the no new taxes,
> intelligent design, home schooling, voucher crowd has eroded the
> quality of our schools, job are being outsourced so we need to
> continue a policy of prohibition that supports drug dealers in the
> style to which they have become accustomed?

I give you a timely example of an unprincipled person, and you want to turn
it into a political debate.  This is why I generally defer to Platt who can
argue polemics much better than philosophy.

Besides, the litany of conservative policies you've jammed into your
question have little if any bearing on your conclusion.  I said nothing
about taxes, ID, or home schooling in my note to Platt.  But if Americans
continue to abandon the principles by which their nation rose to greatness,
it will not long survive.  As for the notion that we can eliminate crime by
legalizing criminal behavior, this makes sense only to those whose concept
of value is pleasuring themselves.

Our Founding Fathers had a far better sense of history and what it takes to
sustain a free nation than today's college-educated citizen.  The idea that
we can "liberate" ourselves from the responsibilities that Platt has
enumerated as "hard work, personal responsibility, self-discipline,
individual initiative, craftsmanship, commitment to excellence, thrift,
delayed gratification, honor of achievement, optimism, life long pursuit of
knowledge" -- to which I would add the shift from individualism to
collectivism -- has eroded our standards in virtually every aspect of
society.

Whatever your political ideology, unless this trend is reversed, America is
on its way to becoming a third-rate nation with reasonable probability of
being surpassed by China, India or Japan as early as the next century.

--Ham