"It sounds like you are endorsing a hidden dictatorial government with total control, in the hopes it will do good things. "
I did not mean that. I was first talking about this article after Sept 11 that says the gov't set up a "shadow gov't" that would be activated in the event the president and many high-ranking leaders were killed. https://nyti.ms/2uK0629

I am saying I don't have a problem with having a doomsday backup plan to keep the gov't running normally in a major disaster. My problem is "normally" it runs with too much cost and power. In some the event of a major attack the normal gov't or, if activated, the shadow gov't, would use the emergency to restrict freedoms further.

This is why we support a philosophy of reason as a necessity to reverse the course of the culture and politics. There are no shortcuts. Subjectivism and mysticism will never do it.

That is indeed, a big "If". My personal experience is that most people I know seem focused on what things they will do for entertainment, than what direction and events are happening in the country. Spreading the ability to think about the impact of things past "I like/no like" will be difficult at best for a number of reasons....

I said if they had better ideas. Most today don't. They will if better ideas are spread through the culture, countering the intellectual trend for over a century. There are no short cuts..

FDR wasn't the first progressive president, his cousin Theodore was. See Ekirch's The Decline of American Liberalism, but more important, FDR did not cushion the Depression. He made it worse and dragged it out with his statist economic policies. He ran for his first term to the 'right' of Hoover, then implemented Hoover's platform and worse. See John T. Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth (2nd ed). Flynn lived through it as a journalist. Several other books debunking the myths and documenting what FDR did to make it all worse followed that one, such as the more recent The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression is a book by Amity Shlaes.

You suggested that for readers of this forum. For supporters of wage controls, Venezuela would be dismissed as an 'extreme case' with a lot more going on, telling us nothing about wage controls.

Thank you, I will need to see how she saw it, as WW2 is a very complicated kettle of fish, and I can already relate several conflicting variations on the whys, that I am not sure anyone really knows are true or not. I agree with your WW1 statement,

hank you for the lesson.....

Oh, thank you! I did not know that, I am seeing how it works: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

When you refer to another post on the forum you can use its Permalink to link to it. Right click on the Permalink at the bottom of the post and copy and paste the url into your post referring to it.

We should not have been in WWI at all. The progressives wanted that and got it.

What did FDR do to try to prepare for WWII? The country overwhelmingly didn't want to be in it, but he kept pushing behind the scenes to make it necessary regardless of the lack of preparation. He provoked the Japanese into making the first move, not expecting it to be Pearl Harbor and leaving us terribly vulnerable both at Pearl Harbor and in our ability to fight after it came.

Ayn Rand wrote an insightful essay, including references to specific wars like WWI & II, "The Roots of War" in her anthology Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and on the web at https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1966...

OK, I had forgotten that little tidbit, WW just doesn't stand out when trying to sort out the great Progressives of our time, there are so many to choose from....:)

Go back about 30 years. The first true Progressive was Woodrow Wilson, although Theodore Roosevelt certainly tended that way as well. Wilson wrote several papers on the use of Executive Power advocating for a President with wide authority to act independent of Congress.

Ah, you seem to believe that people have "better ideas", which I would say is not always true. Many people vote for people based on weird criteria, a lot will vote for one based on ONE hot button item (like abortion, gay marriage, race, sex, etc) which is one of the tools your statists use to control enough of the population to stay in power, along with controlling money blocks through federal programs. I would say people will vote for a person in that regard with no concern for ideas and the "whole package", and leave a "better politician" (which should almost be an oxymoron, like "honest politician") in the dust, because he spoke honestly and did not cave into a specific interest to grab votes. Since you have eliminated the Convention of States as a possible tool to impose some controls, what would you say is the tools that are available to a "thinking voter"?

Gotcha. I couldn't tell which point you were referring to. Thanks for clarifying.

OK ewv, I will defer to your greater knowledge of philosophy and politics. I have not studied and have not had time to study them. I just pull from what history I have picked up, and that was FDR was the first successful "Progressive" to become President, and while he may have done some good in cushioning the Depression, he did a lot more bad in the institutions he created and strengthened.

That is indeed true, I was trying to give some texture as to why the idea did not work as intended.

Yes, I am not disagreeing with that point, I was speaking purely on the military aspect, and why the militia idea was unworkable. Which, by the way, is still somewhat used, in the existence of the National Guard.

No but it still serves as an example for those who refuse to compromse their politics "on principle" and then will both vote and encourage such controls "for the good of the eople". Philosophy alone is wasted on such people, which was a root item in the article, despite concrete proof minimum wage kills jobs and business, idiots continue to scream and yell for it, to pander for votes. Sometimes you need simple pictures for them, ewv...

Why ask Venezuela? There is so much wrong there that minimum wage policies are the least of it. Rhetorically blaming everything on Venezuela misses the point of why it is so bad there in accordance with altruist-collectivist principles. It isn't about isolated policy decisions.

What the "founders wanted" for a minimal standing army does not pertain to the situation today in which we obviously require much more to defend against a much greater and continuous threat in a world made 'smaller' by technology. Conservative rote appeals to religion and tradition from the 18th century are not a substitute for understanding principles and how to apply them.

Classical liberalism did not turn into progressive politics. Classical liberalism was the polittical ideas of the original American secular individualism on which the country was founded. It was replaced, beginning over a hundred years ago, by bad ideas imported from Europe. That is what created Pragmatism and its politics of Progressivism. If today's dominant philosophy had been prevalent at the founding of the country we would never have gotten the Constitution or the Declaration. To blame all this on "power struggles" in "institutions" is profoundly naive.

The people in 3/4 of the states are not going to force Washington to change the trend to statism and collectivism. The bad ideas in Washington which are driving this are the same as the bad ideas in the states. If the people had better ideas they would vote for better politicians. The conservative wish for changing the constitution as our salvation is profoundly anti-intellectual and hopeless.

I disagree. The system worked as written, but it holds several unavoidable caveats.

1. Individual freedom of choice. People have the ability to reject the rules and constraints build into the Constitution. The Constitution only builds rules. The fallacy is that it can dictate human action as a result.

2. The system provides for its own change. And the system has been changed virtually since its inception, sometimes with good intent but more often with the intent to void the original provisions and constraints. Case in point are the bureaucracies which have been given effective Legislative powers, bloating the Executive far beyond its Constitutional authority.

3. The Judiciary intentionally overriding or reforming original Intent. This can be from a sense of activism, referral to foreign law, or other items. Provisions were made to rein in this type of action, but depends to a great extent on #4.

4. Corruption of elected officials. The adoption of partisan policies which contradict the Founding principles of this Nation pervert oversight of the Judiciary or Executive through Impeachment, just as they allow for the approval of similarly corrupted Judiciary nominees.

John Adams put it accurately and succinctly when he stated:
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

blarman, see below (or above depending on how it posts) for why we cannot say "the founders wanted" as while a good idea, it failed in practice.