Investor’s Business Daily has a collection of columnists from both ends of the spectrum. Here’s is one writers perspective on Obama’s recent comments concerning calls for repealing Obamacare.
Health Care Reform Returns Us To Time Of Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’
There was a whiff of tyranny in President Obama’s dare to Republicans to “go for it” and try to repeal health reform.
At the signing ceremony last month, he used the Alinskyite tactic of ridicule and mocked Republican warnings, looking up to see if the ceiling was falling in with the arrival of ObamaCare.
It just wasn’t the same man who two years ago assured Americans: “I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together.”
Just what does “together” mean?
To some extent, it means what Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English political philosopher, believed it to mean.
Saul Alinsky may have described how to bring about big government, but centuries earlier Hobbes made the case for why .
Building on Roman theories of the superiority of the emperor, the author of “Leviathan” argued that nothing should come between the citizen and a powerful, centralized state.
Dreaming, like Rousseau, that the state could establish a paradise fulfilling the needs of all, Hobbes planted the earliest intellectual seeds of the French Revolution that would erupt more than a century later.
Barack Obama reflects Hobbes in two ways: in the concept of Homo Homini Lupus, that without centralized autocracy man wolfishly devours his fellow man (presumably with guns and religion); and in the Hobbesian notion that the power of the people must be embodied in one man.
“Leviathan” is an apt metaphor for the monster that the modern state has become. But the giant sea creature Hobbes takes from the Book of Job is also “a king over all the children of pride” who “will laugh him to scorn that shaketh the spear.”
As “children of pride,” the natural state is a “war of every man against every man” in which life for all, as Hobbes famously wrote, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
A centralized state is the only force that can bring peace, according to Hobbes. Further than that, the state power must be concentrated in one individual — freely given by the people in a “social contract” in which they give up their sovereignty.
Jesuit historian Frederick Copleston pointed out that in Hobbes’ thinking such power need not be only under a monarchy: “The theory of the covenant is, in part at least, a device to exhibit the rational character of subjection to the sovereign and of his exercise of power.”
You can read the entire article here.
UPDATE: CNET News reports that the DC Federal Appellate Court has said the FCC has “no authority to impose strict Net neutrality regulations on Internet providers.“
It just gets more and more interesting…