Too Big To Fail? by Dick Clark

"One of the most baffling phenomena of fascism is the almost incredible collaboration between men of the extreme Right and the extreme Left in its creation. The explanation lies at this point. Both Right and Left joined in this urge for regulation. The motives, the arguments, and the forms of expression were different but all drove in the same direction. And this was that the economic system must be controlled in its essential functions and this control must be exercised by the producing groups."

While the fanatics from the Left have been calling all comers either "racist" or "child-hater" over whether or not people should be forced to buy a product they don't want, their opposition is divided into two oil-and-water camps.

In the first camp are the stereotypical partisan naysayers of the political Right. Think of the football fans who spill their beer tele-heckling the referee every time the call on the field hurts "their" team. They all voted for Bush the Lesser despite his theretofore-unprecedented prescription drug entitlement program and expensive and murderous imperial campaigns, and now they don't even see the obvious hypocrisy of their newly vivified, newly vocalized small-government, slash-the-budget convictions. And of course, don't take away the Department of Education, Social Security, Medicare, or the minimum wage – what do you think this is, the Old Right? Those guys who swore to fight those New Deal and Great Society abominations to the death, well, they did. And heaven forbid that we jettison the DEA and the CIA! Who would protect us from third-world peasants and their dangerous plants and headgear?

No, this is compassionate Jack Bauer neoconservatism! We need our kids lined up every morning feeling their hearts beat in pace with the rhythm of that glorious denial of the individual conscience, the Pledge of Allegiance, and we need them doing it in a public school while sipping on subsidized milk! Just don't tell us where to shop for our gallbladder surgery – not while you are holding that blue campaign sign anyway.

In the second camp is every sensible human being in the United States who has ever balanced a checkbook and who has not been convinced by state apologists that math somehow functions differently when numbers get really, really big. This camp contains the people who realize that the problem with Johnny's credit card debt is not that the credit card companies refuse to expand his credit line anymore. The folks who have the free time to stand around and wave signs in DC's barren wasteland of sterile bureaucracies and cold monuments to war criminals probably aren't going to be representative samples of this population. Regardless, even these people know that more indebtedness now means more pain later.

More: Too Big To Fail? by Dick Clark

The Left-Right paradigm is one of false division of the populace, with each side fighting for control, not for the benefit of the populace but of those in control.