What is the common good?
Editor:
Rob Witwer’s column, “Which came first, freedom or government,” did a good job of pointing out that our freedom is not given to us by permission of our government. What is given by permission can be taken away and is not freedom.
However, Witwer made a grave mistake at the end of the column by stating that government is necessary to preserve the common good. What is the common good? Shouldn’t it refer to the sum of all individuals involved?
How does the latest gang of politicians determine what is the good of individuals? Remember, Stalin, Hitler and many others of their ilk thought they were promoting the common good.
As philosopher Ayn Rand correctly identified: “When ‘the common good’ of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.”
That is what we are experiencing now. The common good is destroying our individual rights. Witwer asks which side we are on. The sides are individualism or collectivism, and the common good destroys individualism and supports collectivism.
Judy Kempf
Freedoms have costs
Editor:
Rob Witwer makes it sound so simple by totally ignoring the population and technology components of the issue. And he is certainly ignoring the economic mess this country is currently experiencing because our big financial institutions wanted to have less regulation and more freedom.
Two Republican senators initiated and got passed the financial deregulation bill that broke down the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated the investment banks from commercial banks. That bill had worked successfully for decades. It was not complicated.
Now, in a perfect world, where the individuals running our large corporations and financial institutions act with common concern for the general welfare, we would not need regulations to control their greed. But in light of the recent lesson that this issue should teach us, will we never learn?
An added issue that has yet to see the light of a complex topic is the trades being done by computer alone with no human interference. Yes, they started that about 10 years ago, but it now has reached near nightmare proportions. No human interference. No one to regulate or control these programs.
I have just started to read the book titled “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis. It is supposed to be humorous as well as informative. It does put the explanation of subprime mortgages, CDS (credit default swaps), bond rating organizations, etc., into more understandable terms, but where it is supposed to be humorous I find it fails, since too many people have been hurt by actions or lack of actions.
Read it before you answer Witwer’s question. And then ask yourself, “Who pays for these freedoms?” There are costs to them.
Grace Todd