In today’s political debate, people on the left always bring up compromise. Colin Powell did it Sunday morning again. Usually, when you bring up compromise today, it means you are losing the debate.
They compromised — the Founding Fathers compromised on slavery. They had to in order to create a country. They compromised on the composition of the Senate, of the House, of the Supreme Court, of a president — what are the president’s powers? Can you imagine more difficult compromises today?
Compromise is how this country was founded, and unless two people in disagreement with each other don’t find a way to reach out to one another and make compromises, you don’t get a consensus that allows you to move forward.
Today, compromise has a totally different meaning than it did in 1775. Usually in the context of today’s version of “compromise”, it means the left gets most of what they want, and the right gets to spend more on defense. We rarely see free market principles injected into government programs or smaller government. Tax decreases are passed with a “sunset”. Tax increases and increased regulation are passed by fiat with no end.
Compromise also gets us “Christmas Tree” legislative bills filled with ear marks and special legislation designed to help out pals and cronies. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. That isn’t the fault of government per se, it’s human nature. Communists “compromise” in much the same way. The only answer that solves our present problems is to shrink government to its base case. Where is the compromise in that?
Powell is technically correct when he says individual states compromised on the question of slavery in order to get the Constitution passed. There were subsequent slavery compromises made after the Constitution was passed. He may not recall, but we eventually fought a bloody war because of the compromise. However, when dealing with Great Britain and the King, the Revolutionaries didn’t compromise. At least this doesn’t sound very compromising to me.
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When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
It goes on…
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security
I don’t think those were the words of compromise.
Then of course there is world history. The Treaty of Versailles was a compromise. World War Two started because of it. Great Britain famously compromised with Germany in 1939. That was good governance wasn’t it? Kept Great Britain out of a war for at least a few months anyway.
It’s really too late for small government advocates to turn to a system of compromise now. Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, a hyper agressive Environmental Protection Agency, a partisan National Labor Relations Board, crony capitalism, censorship and the math of government entitlement programs threaten to break the back of productive citizens. This aggressive attack by the left leaves them no choice but to fight and totally repeal all the crap that is being done to turn America from a representative republic founded upon Adam Smith’s capitalistic ideals to a western style socialist democracy.
It doesn’t take a genius to look across the Atlantic and see the direction we are headed. The Europeans were wrong in 1600 when the Pilgrim’s took leave of their inhospitality, and they are wrong the way they run their governments and structure society today. Take a peek across the Pacific, the Japanese and Chinese aren’t any better. That’s why they coined the phrase, “American Exceptionalism”.
Or in a different vernacular, some goombah’s from the west side of Chicago used to say, “I got yer compromise right here.”
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