“Collective guilt is one of the legacies of the 1960s that is still with us. We are still seeing a guilt trip for slavery being laid on people who never owned a slave in their lives, and who would be repelled by the very idea of owning a slave. Back in the 1960s, it was considered Deep Stuff among the intelligentsia to say that American society—all of us collectively—were somehow responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King. During the 1960s, the idea spread like wildfire that whatever you were lacking was someone else’s fault—society’s fault. If you were poor, whether at home or in some third-world country, you were one of the ‘dispossessed’ —even if you had never possessed anything to dispossess you of… If other people are somehow responsible for whatever is lacking in your life, lashing out at random against individuals who have done nothing to you personally can sound plausible to many people. Whether or not the latest mass killings at Virginia Tech were a result of medically verifiable insanity, there have always been insane people but there have not always been mass killings with the frequency we have seen since 1960… Instead of banning guns, maybe we should rethink 1960s dogmas.” —Thomas Sowell
Archive for April 30th, 2007
Thomas Sowell
April 30, 2007Senator Fred Thompson
April 30, 2007“Our government, under our Constitution, was established upon the principles of Federalism—that the federal government would have limited enumerated powers and the rest would be left to the states. It not only prevented tyranny, it just made good sense. States become laboratories for democracy and experiment with different kinds of laws. One state might try one welfare reform approach, for example. Another state might try another approach. One would work and the other would not… Federalism also allows for the diversity that exists among the country’s people. Citizens of our various states have different views as to how traditional state responsibilities should be handled. This way, states compete with each other to attract people and businesses—and that is a good thing. Everyone in Washington embraces Federalism until it comes to someone’s pet project designed to appeal to the voters. Then, oftentimes, even the most ardent Federalist throws in with the ‘Washington solution’ crowd…[I]f conservatives use Federalism as a tool with which to reward our friends and strike our enemies, instead of treating it as a valued principle, we are doing a disservice to our country—as well as to the cause of conservatism.” —Former Sen. Fred Thompson
Conservative Libertarian Outpost 