The essence of Constitutional Liberalism is the diffusion of power. It assumes that bad people will come and go regularly throughout the life of the nation, but that the damage they can do will be limited by all the checks on their power. All of the Bill of Rights had as their purpose putting legal checks on the usurpation of authority by either the Federal Government, or the sundry States.
The foundational problem with what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism–in addition to the softness and moral weakness it breeds–is that it makes people dependent on the government. As I believe Gerald Ford said, any government powerful enough to provide all your needs is powerful enough to take from you everything you have. All that is missing currently in most Western European nations is the will on the part of the governments. This can change. History consists mainly in tyranny, and only rarely in political freedom. Someone always either thinks they know better, or simply relishes power. Intellectuals are typically guilty of both.
Any nation that is perfectly safe is perfectly unfree. The only way to prevent “accidents” is to ban all motion. The government doesn’t want us to smoke, or not wear seatbelts, or ride motorcycles without helmets (which will become a ban on ATV’s and motorcycles), or eat food they don’t approve of. To avoid the infinitesimal risk of a repeat of 9/11 they grab our genitalia or take pictures of us in the nude.
Life is risk, and it always ends in death. This is the reality. The role of the government is keep other people from interfering with my freedom, but not to prevent me from doing things I enjoy and which they don’t approve of. If I want to eat corn flakes and feed them to my kids, that is my own damn business. If I want to smoke, that is my own damn business. In my view, the “studies” on second hand smoke are so cooked as to constitute de facto scientific fraud, along the same lines as the farcical demonization of dietary fat, that had the opposite of the intended effect, and instead made our nation fat.
I don’t want a safety net. I want freedom. I would rather live under a bridge overpass and die of hunger than to let this march towards tyranny continue.
Every person on Medicare or Social Security can be told what to do. Every person on unemployment, or disability, or who works for the government can be told what to do.
Always, everywhere, the goal of leftists is to cultivate dependency. Dependency means pliancy. You can do what you want, and if they object, you cut them off. Figuratively, they want us all living in our parent’s basement, with them as the parents. They want to decide who lives and dies, and how they live in the meantime. George Bernard Shaw was very, very clear about this. He knew that like one of his heroes–Adoph Hitler–he could speak very vicious things openly, and that no one would listen to him, even though he was perfectly sincere.