“Food for Thought” is an original bi-weekly column appearing every other Tuesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Norman Imberman. Norman is a retired podiatrist who loves playing piano, writing music, lawn bowling, bridge, reading, classical music, going to movies, plays, concerts and traveling. Archived columns can be found here. FFT-only RSS feed available here.

Your children and grandchildren will spit on your graves when they realize how your philosophy of pragmatism has destroyed their world. Your ideology of whims, hopes, experimenting and prayers have sanctioned and condoned theft, coercion, corruption, war, and self-sacrifice all in the name of the good and fairness. However, you never stopped to define, “what is the good and what is fairness?” Some day history will judge how your misunderstanding of the spirit of the American Revolution and what constitutes the good and fairness, has wrought nothing but chaos, mistrust, economic depression, social conflict, despair, and hate between people and nations here and all over the world.



You rationalize coercion, theft, fraud, cheating and corruption all in the name of “doing the right thing” and “following what your hearts tell you”. You rationalize such coercion in the name of protecting—the children—senior citizens—the various ethnic groups—the poor—the unions—the wage earners—the victims of anything, ad infinitum. By favoring such special privileges to various interest groups, you have set up a never-ending spiral of reprisals (class warfare) by those interest groups that have not received their “fair share” of special privileges, and if continued will get you what you deserve. It is a natural consequence of your refusal to see and think. Even when our ship of state takes the final plunge into the depths, your last drowning screams will be, “we couldn’t help it; we were only trying to do the right thing.” Your conclusions on what constitutes “the right thing” have been based upon a standard of self-sacrifice and destruction. Check your premises!

This warning also applies to Conservatives, Constitutionalists and Teapartyists. Coercion sanctioned by the Constitution is still coercion and does not make it less harmful to the victims. (The commerce clause is an example). Your style of coercion is almost as bad as the coercion inflicted by the left. It is just not as obvious to you. Instead of focusing upon the pitfalls of liberal policies, (and there are many), focus on the forms and instances of coercion that you favor. Look in the mirror. You too are the enemy. It is uncanny how many reasons (rationalizations) you can find in an attempt to excuse the degree of coercion you favor and for which you vote. The most popular excuses are that we need coercion to protect—the children—senior citizens—the banks—the employers—the farmers—big business and corporations—the environment—the oil companies—Social Security—Medicare. The list is almost endless.

European society has almost passed the path of no return. America is the last bastion of hope for a return to sanity, but as long as the left, the middle or the right favors the initiation of force or fraud against their fellow man, whether the force or fraud is perpetrated by individuals, groups, or governments, they are planting the seeds of self destruction in that society. If the present course of coercion continues in America, it will lead the world into a new dark age of suffering from which the human race might never recover. The world of 1984 will become a reality, not just an interesting novel.