Liberty, Freedom and Power -- A delicate balancing act in "difficult times."

There is much to be said in defence of this argument, but there is also much to be said in opposition to this argument. We easily can tell it was written by a prog.

First, note the language "keep under control." Conservatives are suspicious of power and believe that government needs to be perpetually limited and heavily restrained. However, unlike libertarians, conservatives revere authority (properly understood, as differentiated from 'power') and feel that there also needs to be prudent restraints on human passion.

So, while a conservative bristles at the thought of power trying to "keep under control" people from exercising their liberty, they understand that order is the first need of society. -And that for us to live in society with a justly-ordered liberty, the conservative knows that people cannot be free to do whatever the hell pleases them. But a conservative also knows that no perfect societal order can be designed, constructed or enforced like one is making a machine. A justly-ordered liberty is only approachable; not totally attainable, because man is neither machine nor automaton and that much freedom of action needs to remain well outside the limits of the law. Indeed, the conservative is suspicious of the legalistic society which tries to proscribe all bad behaviour with a legal code on one hand, and tacitly endorse all behaviour that hasn't been made illegal, on the other.

Also, notice how the author of this little meme makes the massive leap from wartime to "difficult times" in a single bound. We are not at war. The Left likes to posture as anti-war, but they are eager to start pseudo-wars; war on poverty, war on racism, war on illiteracy, war on bullying, etcetera. They are eternally quite eager to put our nation (and let's be pedantically precise for a moment; the United States is not a nation but rather a federation of independent states) on a war-footing. Almost nothing is a better excuse to consolidate and enlarge power of government than war. And no would-be tyrant would ever refuse a war―real or euphemized―if he believed it would increase his own power. So we must be aware that there are always tyrants (and their toadies) waiting in the wings, hoping to start wars, not because they want to win those wars, but because they want to win the spoils of war; power, and the power to do to others "under their control" and gain the riches that come with it.

William Pitt remarked that “necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” To today's impatient progressives it is necessary that all our problems be solved immediately, and the best way to do that is to empower the government to marshal our resources and direct all our actions. So that is why it has often been said that if you scratch a prog, you'll find a tyrant.

That's also why it's often been said―and perhaps not often enough―that progressives will never let a crisis go to waste. They can turn every problem into an argument for more government power and "control over people" to do as those in charge of government see fit. Of course, progs expect subservience when they hold the reins of power, but they are the first to gnash their teeth and scream bloody murder when the government they've helped so assiduously to empower is run by people who are not progs and have different aims. Of course a progressive's answer to every problem is to put more money and power in the hands of a centralised government, but the key to that is to keep the right people in power, and to these ends the means are justified.

Although they would increase personal freedoms of individuals to "do as they please" sexually and enable the casting off of social taboos, good manners, normative standards, and cherished traditions of conduct, progs have little desire to enlarge human freedom outside the realm of 'personality'. Progs relish opportunities to reduce human freedom in the realms of property and economy, and they show a hostility to freedom of expression if it differs from their own. They are eager to usurp both individual freedom (properly understood as the absence of restraint) and liberty (properly understood as the array of good options), and are eager to massively expand the powers of government to "keep under control" the citizenry so that they may direct them toward their devised and desired aims.

Rather than placing the expansion of 'freedom' as the chief political value and aim, as libertarians and libertines do, conservatives prize and aim at a justly-ordered liberty, and we know that only such a society will enlarge the sphere of liberties; and that it may do so without simply expanding our freedoms by removing restraints. Our Framers rarely used the term freedom, and when they did, they certainly did not mean it in the absolute, abstract and perfect way―with a capital F―that libertarians so revere it. Our framers thought of our nation as "conceived in liberty," not Freedom. -But I digress.

Therefore (good grief, thanks for hanging in with me while I circuitously come to the point) conservatives are struggling mightily at this "difficult time" with the healthy tension between liberty and power. We realise that a deadly virus lurks about, and if it is allowed to run amok there is no reason to think that what is happening in the current hotspots won't happen elsewhere.

But on the other hand, the overreach of power in this crisis, may very well do more damage than good. All problems cannot be solved by government edict. The world doesn't work in such black and white dichotomies. Life is primarily trade-offs, of weighing the costs of our alternatives, of striking a balance between costs and gains, and often choosing between more than two less-than-desirable options. If, for example, we wanted to eliminate all automobile accidents, we could ban the automobile; but at what cost? If, at the end of this crisis, only twenty thousand or even a hundred thousand die from the disease, will it have been worth the economic cost? -A cost that will have an unseen death toll because poverty kills.

So what is a conservative to think about all this naked use of power to shut down our economy, shut us in our homes, and shut up the voices of dissent about the shutting up? Well, for now I guess we just muddle along, trying to do the right things, behaving as if we haven't been ordered to do the right things, and hoping that both the tyrants and the jackasses who are doing the wrong things for the right reasons would just shut up.