Recently, I happened upon a blog that caught my interest. The post that I read was entitled:
"Just a Little Nudge? There is No Compassion Through Coercion."
http://humaneconnectionblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/just-little-nudge-there-is-no.html
I was intrigued by the phrase, "compassion through coercion," in the title of the post, so I read further, and decided to comment. My commentary was long, so I broke it into three parts. In the first part, the shortest of the three by far, I wrote:
As your post so nicely illustrates, there is a very strong tendency for those, whose moral values place humane ideals in a preeminent position, to want to exert such coercion, i.e., to give people that "little nudge onto the 'right path.' To 'help' them change their minds through sheer force of one’s own mental will." But, is so often the case, this desire to "nudge" other people becomes unfortunately transformed into partisan, political activism in which noble values become conflated with a divisive "we vs. them" mentality.
And, so often, those with the lofty and noble desire to better the human condition and to stop "all the suffering and injustice and destruction in the world" get caught up in "progressive" group causes. Such partisan, political causes reinforce automatic belief systems that dictate thought, feeling, and behavior. These folks, accordingly, end up accepting the premise that the federal government is the instrument through which to implement their nudging on a grand scale. Lost in this compassionate, coercive shuffle is the recognition that, to advocate such federal intervention into the realm of moral values is not only not permitted by the Constitution, no matter how much our elected legislators wish to stretch and distort the enumerated powers granted to the federal government, but no amount of political posturing and justification can bend the "General Welfare" clause to support "social justice" or "welfare" programs.
(To be continued in the next post)
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