1 Never forget that Republicans advocate "limited government" ...
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 20152. government "limited" to segregating, fleecing, surveilling, incarcerating, violating people of color in white-racist police state;
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 20153. government "limited" to forced pregnancies, harassment, neglect, and enforced rape culture in a never ending war on women;
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 20154. government "limited" to the humiliation, bullying, isolation, subordination, prohibition of queer folks, families, desires, and lifeways;
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 20155. government "limited" to the protection of plutocratic treasure-piles accumulated through deception, fraud, exploitation and violence;
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 20156. government "limited" to an economy shaped by the Defense Department, devoted to war, guns, prisons, pollution, and paramilitary police.
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 20157. Oh, yes, never forget that Republicans advocate "Limited Government"!
— Dale Carrico (@dalecarrico) August 10, 2015
3 comments:
Limited government is and always has been a contridiction in terms just the same as the term "BIG" government has. Governments can either be popular and democratic or autocratic and elitist. To say limited government without qualifying that what you mean is a more democratic government means that you have no idea about politics. In this day and age we have currently only one feature of democracy in our societies and that is universal suffrage which is why we need to desperately try to democratise our entire societies, not just governments but economies and social spheres as well.
I agree with what you say of course. I'm not sure limited government is so much a contradiction as a vacuity deployed to evade the matter at hand. I mean, even totalitarian governments are stricto sensu limited inasmuch as they are not omniscient/omnipotent after all. The point of making a "principle" of smaller or lesser or more limited government is really a way of evading questions about what government actually are supposed to be and what they are actually supposed to do. In the absence of an affirmation of a viewpoint on governance against which to measure its actually-existing implementation, smaller, lesser, more limited really express an anti-governmentality, a kind of undigested anarchic sensability which is less a political position at all (even if, here in the United States, one of our only two viable political parties is completely suffused with this attitude) than a kind of pre-political lack of a position.
I agree with you about the need to democratize both our economic and political systems -- suffrage, eligibility of office-holding, jury trials, recourse to law, public education, healthcare, unemployment insurance, retirement pensions are all dimensions of this democratization, all of them presently under threat and none of them ever fully implemented but all of them woven into the commonsense of commonwealth in ways that can be taken up by partisans of democratization in the service of real equity-in-diversity.
What I mean by limited government being a contridiction is the fact that the bearest minimum we can argue that the word government mean is of course administration, coordination and collective action. Therefor by saying you want limited government means you want to have no coordination or administration not self - government (collective and individual). Therefore I made my claim that you can only want less "government" if you mean you want less hiearichal control, domination and exploitation, which in turn we can argue means we must democratise government so it does not have any of these features. It cannot mean limited government to private property rights since we know from history that the reason our governments are hiearichal control and domination is because of private property rights not the other way around, despite the ahistorical and childish viewpoint of the anarcho capitalists and propertarians.
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