Important Questions

We rant and praise our Constitution, but do we really know what we're saying? We crave a return to gold as Constitutional money, but is it only because we happen to own some coins squirreled away? For the most part I don't believe Americans are prepared for a return to constitutional government. We would have to reclaim our once cherished individual responsibilities. That means less government, my dear reader. Be intellectually honest with yourself now....Are we as parents able to take responsibility for the education of our own children? Now, I said education, and that doesn't mean just putting them on a yellow bus! I mean learning. Can we live without the government certifying every trade and work skill? How are you at replacing a toilet? What do we know about crop rotation, fertilizers, local marketing, etc? How many of us can run a wood splitter? Even more important where to get the wood. If you think a temporary power outage now to be an annoyance, wait until your local utility is unable to buy its natural gas or oil for any amount of dollars. Who do you blame? You blame the government, of course. But, then what do you do - - you turn around and ask the government for help! (a recent email from The Charleston Voice)

The questions he asks above are not merely rhetorical - they are practical in nature. I suppose the sad reality behind most modern conservatives supporting unprincipled and pragmatic positions is precisely because they know the answers to these questions. They are personally unprepared for the increased responsibility that must accompany increased liberty.

We have bought lock, stock and barrel into the notion that government must be involved in every aspect of life - from cradle to grave. Most of this has come about when good intentioned people said "there ought to be a law" - a statement generally following some irresponsible behavior by some individual or individuals.

I am conflicted as to the answer. That is the primary argument that most folks hold out against paleoconservatives. I know in our time, in the circumstances that are reality, every man cannot have his "40 acres and a mule". A true distributivist economic system is impossible, agrarianism on a mass scale is now impossible. It is even impossible to thwart the nature of modern man and his desire for bigger and cheaper. The mass of the population is not, and never will be ready to accept a world in which they, as individuals, are help accountable for their own well-being, where they are forced to conform to community standards in order to survive, where individual freedom comes with enormous responsibility and is tempered by the small community in which a person lives.

Even the very notion of community is confused in our modern mind. Many assume that their "homeowners associations" are akin to the sort of community that we paleoconservatives speak of - nothing could be further from the truth. Most of those associations take on the likeness of a communist party - demanding that all surrender something for the common good. Real community is of course different - it does not demand, it compels; there is a tremendous difference.

In some real sense paleoconservatives do not offer a real solution to the problems of the world around us - at least not a solution that the citizen-drones around us would accept. Perhaps we remain as simple a voice for some distant future generation, rising out of a cataclysmic future. Maybe that is too cynical of a view. I remain hopeful that all is not lost and that some small remnant remains that is capable seeing reality.