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IPFS News Link • Political Theory

The Age of Entitlement

• Review by David B. Stern

Put more amply is Christopher Caldwell's thesis:

"The Civil Rights Act Of 1964 was … a legislative repeal of the First Amend-ment's implied right to freedom of association. Over decades it polarized the political parties and turned them into something like secret societies, each of them loyal to a different constitutional understanding. Democrats, loyal to the post-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that they owed their ascendancy to a rollback of the basic constitutional freedoms Americans cherished most. Republicans, loyal to the pre-1964 constitution, could not acknowledge (or even see) that the only way back to the free country of their ideals was through the repeal of the civil rights laws. The combination was a terrible one – rising tensions along with a society-wide inability to talk or think straight about anything." (p.278)

Narrowing his summary's focus, Caldwell continues:

"Ronald Reagan, for all the prosperity Americans enjoyed under his presidency, never found anything like the resources to carry out the projects Lyndon Johnson devised in the 1960s. He merely averted the social confrontation to which events had been building in the 1970s by devising a new system for financing those projects. That is what today's national debt is.  (Italics added) The financial collapse of 2008 was a sign that the government had exhausted the resources of the not-yet-born and would now tap the resources of the living. (p. 279)

(Reviewer's Note: The financial collapse of 2020 and Congress's $2 trillion spending response will further burden taxpayers of all ages.)


www.universityofreason.com/a/29887/KWADzukm