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{"id":36735,"date":"2012-07-16T01:06:16","date_gmt":"2012-07-16T08:06:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=36735"},"modified":"2014-12-30T15:35:58","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T22:35:58","slug":"praise-the-goodness-of-our-god-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2012\/07\/praise-the-goodness-of-our-god-king.html","title":{"rendered":"Praise the Goodness of Our God King!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

~~For from him and to him and through him is all business.<\/del><\/p>\n~~

~~\u201cIf you\u2019ve got a business \u2014 you didn\u2019t build that. Somebody else made that happen.\u201d<\/a><\/del><\/p>\n~~

See, if you have a job, you didn\u2019t make that happen. If you have a house and a car, you didn\u2019t make that happen. Somebody else made that happen. Everything for the God King. Nothing outside the God King! Nothing against the God King! Praise his goodness to us for making us able to do business!<\/del><\/p>\n

Update: A number of people (including John C Wright, no fan of Obama) are arguing that he is making the common sense point on behalf of solidarity: that no man is an island. Fair enough. As when Randian and related lunatics argue for subsidiarity, he is right as far as that goes. No man is an island. Nobody is an atomized individual who relies on nobody and nothing to pull himself up by his bootstraps to success (which is why Randian are lunatics to say so and why their cardinal error is to completely ignore solidarity).<\/p>\n

So my question: can somebody find for me the passage in Obama\u2019s speech where he also articulate subsidiarity as a counter point to his emphasis on solidarity. Because if he doesn\u2019t, he winds up (particularly given his track record of smashing conscience and crushing individuals under the weight of his Caesaro-corporate police state, simply uttering some fascist boilerplate dressed up as the rhetoric of solidarity, just as Randian Selfism bearing a passing resemblance to subsidiarity.<\/p>\n

Find me that passage and I will retract this blog post.<\/p>\n

Upper update: A reader responds:<\/p>\n

All of the following seem to me to have at least elements of subsidiarity:<\/p>\n

When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. <\/em><\/p>\n

And frankly, government can\u2019t solve every problem.<\/p>\n

They understood that succeeding in America wasn\u2019t about how much money was in your bank account, but it was about whether you were doing right by your people, doing right by your family, doing right by your neighborhood, doing right by your community, doing right by your country.<\/p>\n

Fair enough. Then I retract the complaint above. Sounds like Obama was making a reasonable point.<\/p>\n

However, as a reader notes, the Prez should bear in mind all that \u201cstanding on the shoulders of giants\u201d stuff and call off\u00a0war on the Catholic Church and Catholic conscience since nobody has done more to lay the groundwork for the benefits we enjoy than the Catholic intellectual tradition that gave rise to the West.\u00a0 Obama saws off the branch he is sitting on as he borrows from the tradition to talk about solidarity while making war on Catholic conscience.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it is supremely ironic that this apostle of communitarianism is, when it comes to the exercise of the raw power to murder whoever he likes and call them \u201cenemy combatants\u201d, as solitary and unaccountable to another living soul as J.D. Rockefeller or Josef Stalin.\u00a0 True, he does not exercise that power since he does not (yet) have total freedom from our system of checks and balances. But the obvious drive of his administration has been to perpetually seek more and more unilateral power.\u00a0 You live in a glass house, Mr. President, when you preach about solidarity while seizing the power to jail and kill whoever you like with no accountability whatsoever.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"