Whether you agree with him or not, George Will is consistently one of the most insightful pundits in America. His recent article, which ran in today’s Albuquerque Journal, but can be found on the Washington Post website, views the last 100 years of public policy debates through the prism of the differing worldviews of James Madison and Woodrow Wilson.
Madison and the Founders believed:
believed that free government’s purpose, and the threats to it, are found in nature. The threats are desires for untrammeled power, desires which, Madison said, are “sown in the nature of man.” Government’s limited purpose is to protect the exercise of natural rights that pre-exist government, rights that human reason can ascertain in unchanging principles of conduct and that are essential to the pursuit of happiness.
According to Wilson and the so-called “progressives” (who really tend towards socialism), “Government exists to dispense an ever-expanding menu of rights — entitlements that serve an open-ended understanding of material and even spiritual well-being.” In practice, this means that that government has no limits.
This is the battle that is being waged in America today. It is not new, but Will certainly frames it in an interesting way.
Is this the same George Will who had a column about global warming that was so filled with falsehoods that it had a rebuttal days later in his own paper? http://bit.ly/aB4rNl
Is this the same George Will who devoted valuable space to telling people they should not wear jeans? http://bit.ly/aB4rNl
George Will is a joke of the legacy media that backs the massive intrusion on civil liberties that is the Arizona immigration law http://bit.ly/aB4rNl
That Mr. Gessing believes that the neocon George Will is “insightful” shows how low Gessing’s bar for “insightful” is.
The column that Gessing praises? It’s filled with inaccuracies. http://hnn.us/articles/124669.html
I would expect Gessing to retract this post, but he is not in the business of accuracy, but partisan point-scoring. This Washington-DC think tank style of punditocracy is apparently what the CATO foundation and RGF’s other funders like.