A pyromaniac in a field of straw men

A pyromaniac in a field of straw men

via PrairiePundit by Merv on 10/6/11

George Will:

Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and former Obama administration regulator (for consumer protection), is modern liberalism incarnate. As she seeks the Senate seat Democrats held for 57 years before 2010, when Republican Scott Brown impertinently won it, she clarifies the liberal project and the stakes of contemporary politics.

The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual's zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism's instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual's own good, it says. Warren says:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own

. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

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There is much more.

The thing I do not like about Warren is that she is a control freak.  She has the same view of business as the fascists .  She is worse than a socialist who wants to own all the business enterprises.  She is content to let others own the businesses as long as she is allowed to run them.  That si the Obama Dodd-Frank model.