Gordon Smith: For the $82M grant money, notice that there was no follow up to say whether that was money wisely spent for the common good.
Ted Kennedy: Healthcare becomes more federalized, reducing action and accountability at local/state level
Tim Scott: Housing becomes more federalized, reducing action and accountability at local/state level.
“We should welcome any positive steps to benefit those in need.” – Taken to the extreme, these ideologies based on empathy, compassion, social justice, equality can produce unintended consequences of long term dysfunction or worse, these ideologies can lead to authoritarian states. In the spirit of the 250 year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’ve discovered how communal of a society we had, built around strong faith, family, and community (low individualism) and how over the centuries, influences coming from advances in wealth, technology, and federal government entitlement programs have encouraged self-interested individualism at the expense often of community and common culture, where compassion should thrive.
Compassion, empathy are key for a free society to strengthen bonds and community. But federal governance is another beast because through legislation of social reform, it can rewire society through non-democratic, sometimes authoritarian means, distorting incentives and reducing much needed action/accountability at the local and state levels of governance. It can be argued that the unconstitutional entitlement programs starting with social security in the Roosevelt administration and expanding with the Great Society have had negative (as well positive) consequences that we have to grapple with today:
• Citizens offloading duties of compassionate citizenship to the State
• Local/State governments offloading responsibilities of serving citizen to the federal government
• Federal government unintentionally creating higher floors but lower ceiling of well-being through entitlement programs
• Fiscal unsustainability / Inability to manage entitlement programs
• Who ultimately is responsible for the homeless, for the depressed, for the less well off? Is it society at large? Local governance? State governance? Federal governance? A fragmented system will not do well in solving these problems.
Human nature and organizational behavior is complicated; we should keep the local and state governments as vibrant laboratories of democracy as it comes to the well-being of citizens and leave the federal government to serve the common good of the country.
Gordon Smith: For the $82M grant money, notice that there was no follow up to say whether that was money wisely spent for the common good.
Ted Kennedy: Healthcare becomes more federalized, reducing action and accountability at local/state level
Tim Scott: Housing becomes more federalized, reducing action and accountability at local/state level.
“We should welcome any positive steps to benefit those in need.” – Taken to the extreme, these ideologies based on empathy, compassion, social justice, equality can produce unintended consequences of long term dysfunction or worse, these ideologies can lead to authoritarian states. In the spirit of the 250 year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’ve discovered how communal of a society we had, built around strong faith, family, and community (low individualism) and how over the centuries, influences coming from advances in wealth, technology, and federal government entitlement programs have encouraged self-interested individualism at the expense often of community and common culture, where compassion should thrive.
Compassion, empathy are key for a free society to strengthen bonds and community. But federal governance is another beast because through legislation of social reform, it can rewire society through non-democratic, sometimes authoritarian means, distorting incentives and reducing much needed action/accountability at the local and state levels of governance. It can be argued that the unconstitutional entitlement programs starting with social security in the Roosevelt administration and expanding with the Great Society have had negative (as well positive) consequences that we have to grapple with today:
• Citizens offloading duties of compassionate citizenship to the State
• Local/State governments offloading responsibilities of serving citizen to the federal government
• Federal government unintentionally creating higher floors but lower ceiling of well-being through entitlement programs
• Fiscal unsustainability / Inability to manage entitlement programs
• Who ultimately is responsible for the homeless, for the depressed, for the less well off? Is it society at large? Local governance? State governance? Federal governance? A fragmented system will not do well in solving these problems.
Human nature and organizational behavior is complicated; we should keep the local and state governments as vibrant laboratories of democracy as it comes to the well-being of citizens and leave the federal government to serve the common good of the country.
In a Christian context of…mankind is created in God’s image…his/her
nature is to be compassionate.
Ok, folks respond in varying degrees;
but in any event, imo, compassion-as-the-driving-force in the legislative
process usually (?) yields unwanted secondary consequences. f
Maybe not “the wrong word”…rather,
a mistaken approach. f
“Compassion” seems the wrong
word for the context of the write’s essay. Legislative context…or inference.
Compassion is a personal “feeling”…
thus, non-negotiable. in dialectic
exercise…so when trying to reach
Aristotle’s level of “reason”, the
parties have nothing to talk about…debate…can’t advance to knowledge.
Accumulating Compassion-driven legislation can bring down a Constitutional Republic, imo.
f