Death of Classical Liberalism: Part I

I've spent much of Queen's Birthday weekend penning a long article on the premise that the Founding Fathers, and Ayn Rand, were (catastrophically) wrong on the ‘inalienable’ nature of the rights pertaining to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A topic that's been on my mind since Lindsay Perigo first brought it up in a thread on his SOLO site, and then since reading, of all things, a history of bureaucracy by Ben Kafka. That article won't be ready until later this week (possibly next weekend), but on reading of Michael Cullen's knighthood, I will put up just one paragraph of it here as a taster. (Still in draft though.)

Because my right to freedom is not a ‘metaphysical given’, I’m looking at the world created by man around me, and am accepting I will never be a free man. Yes, human reason, un-bullied, will always arrive at the wisdom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for each individual one of us, however, we don’t live in an age of political reason. To recall my first quotation, we live in an age where insane politicians have ‘set themselves, knowingly, in revolt against the nature of things’. An age where politicians bribe their electorates with the prospect of a free lunch, then tax, borrow and spend our liberty away trying to achieve the illusion, and when it all goes, and went, wrong, Western economies falling down, as they are, thought they could fix the problems of their Keynesian insanity, with more Keynesian insanity. An age where politicians think the moral devastation wrought by welfarism, can be fixed by more welfarism. A sick age where men who mention freedom as the thing to strive for, are sneered at and jeered at by the feeble minded without the wherewithal to think or argue beyond ad hominem on every blog thread -   look at the comments to this thread. Where even the economists who profess to believe in markets, do so only with the passion of a frosty night, and in the final instance, repair to the well-being of the majority tyranny as the solution to their theoretical aggregates, blinded as they are by their utilitarian fascism – see this thread, and comments.  An age when a Finance Minister who pissed away ten years of New Zealand’s best commodity prices against the wall of the bigger thug state, and who designed an envy tax on the rich in such an absurd manner he distorted the entire tax field, for which IRD are still hanging taxpayers off hooks for, gets a knighthood – Christ! For the same reasons the Enlightenment saw the separation of state and church, now we need to separate the insane state from free markets, which, as the expression of the complex wants and desires of all the individuals in an economy, is to separate the state from the lives of a freed people. But this will never happen in my lifetime.