Elizabeth Warren, challenging Scott Brown for his Senate seat from Masachusett, became the darling of progressives when she succinctly stated the "what's yours is ours" case"
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. .?.?. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Then came the inveitable and welcome pushback from people near my end of the political spectrum who pointed out what collectivist drivel this was. George Will says it nicely:
Such an agenda's premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual's achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual's possession.
Will says of Warren, as William Buckley said of Kenneth Galbraith, that she is "a pyromaniac in a field of straw men." She refutes something nobody claims, that we are all automomous individuals who owe nothing to the social context in which we operate. The social contract between the individual and the group is a given; the only thing to decide is how much weight we give each as we enter into negotiations. The emphasis in this country -- indeed, the whole point of the founding of this country -- is that the main purpose of the contract is to protect the rights of the individual, not the privileges of the group. Progressives don't like that whole concept, so their main mission, as Will says, is "to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual's zone of sovereignty" in order to make it easier for our betters in the regulatory state.
