In your last column for the Phoenix, you criticized Glenn Beck for comparing progressivism to a cancer eating away at the Constitution. While it is your right to be personally offended, the facts do not match up with your views.
You provide a rather compelling personal history to back up your claims. Unfortunately, you choose to use the successes of the past to legitimize the failures of the present. I do not think anyone would disagree with the idea that the progressive reforms provided were a necessity in their day. However, that does not mean that the progressive ideals of today are beneficial to the American people.
Labor unions once meant fighting for equal rights, not special rights. Instead of fighting for the individual, they line their pockets as a special interest, peddling in power and influence-buying. Just ask the United Auto Workers Union how sweet of a deal they got in the Chrysler bankruptcy and how they shafted Chrysler’s creditors in order to make a power grab. There’s a reason only nine percent of Americans that are not in a union right now would actually want to join one.
Teachers’ unions should be making sure we are preparing a generation of bold leaders instead of making sure that the teachers they represent can never lose their jobs. The results are shocking and dismaying: Despite throwing four times more money at public schools than we did 40 years ago, 50 percent of students cannot even find New York state on a map.
As for our revolutionary patriots, they are rolling over in their graves at your suggestion that they were fighting for progressive ideals. If anything, they were seeking conservative revolution by maintaining the rights and freedoms they enjoyed in the colonies. We fought to get rid of the British authority to govern us — not enable them to govern us even more.
The progressive ideology of today is of the kind that actually is a cancer to our Constitution. Progressives think that they know how to run your life (and your checkbook) better than you do. That is why we have ridiculous laws on the books across the country banning various things like baggy pants, washing your car in the driveway, smoking in your own apartment, smiling in your driver’s license photo and playing tag.
Now we have the progressives at it again, seeking to implement a universal healthcare system that will push our nation even further into debt and provide a level of service equivalent to the kind you get at the DMV. This boondoggle will raise premiums, cut Medicare and be the precipice to the destruction of our entire healthcare system, the best in the world. And correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t conservatives win this argument a decade ago?
If you ever read the Constitution, you would know that healthcare, among other things, is not a guaranteed right. Neither is a car, or a television; a job or a big paycheck free housing or free food. Americans are some of the most generous people on the planet and we help people who are in a crisis, but we are growing tired of handing out freebies to every lazy person who provides nothing to the productivity of our nation except perhaps increasing the stock value of Anheuser-Busch and Frito-Lay. I agree that we have some serious problems to tackle in the next decade, but the answer is not progressivism; it’s allowing people the freedom to do what they please as long as, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
That would be change I can believe in.
President, Loyola College Republicans
svera@luccollegerepublican.com

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