The always insigtful Crispin Sartwell thinks so.

Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

America is dead, and no one seems to be mourning. At any moment, we will be as thoroughly bureaucratized as France and as theocratic as Iran. If there is any enthusiasm for – or understanding of – what makes America distinctive and valuable, it is not visible on our political landscape.

In our pathetic little world, some people (Hillary Clinton) want to shape your mind and then take care of you; others (Alberto Gonzales) want to watch you all the time and then intern you. But no one wants you to be free.

I’ve shared these feelings of late. The last coule of Supreme Court terms have bludgeoned liberty at every turn. Even the wine ruling was but a limited victory. States can still ban wine shipments outright. They just can no longer ban only out-of-state shipments. And that, alas, was the only bone this court threw us.

The theocrats chip away at freedom from the right. The Nannycrats chip away from the left. They join hands at the Drug War, where their goals of government control over morality and government control over risk intersect.

Some have suggested that modern politics is no longer about liberal versus conservative, but about statism versus indivdualism. I wish that were true, but it isn’t. There is no debate. Statism has triumphed. It wasn’t even close.

The debate seems to be reduced to whether the people who have appointed themselves to run our lives will run them based on Biblical principles or on healthist dogma.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 12:22 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Nanny State, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.