I would suggest that, in addition to a no-new-taxes pledge, tea partiers insist that every candidate who wants their support sign a pledge to make the federal government as inconsequential in our lives as possible. — Robert Ringer SEE HERE We need to return to an earlier view of government that C.S. Lewis talked about in his inaugural address at Cambridge in 1954.
... In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live "a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" and "pass their time in rest and quietness". But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of "appeal if drives", and "campaigns". Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding "keenness". And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them "rulers". "Leaders" is the modem word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call "magnetism" or "personality".
And this shift from seeking a society in which one lives "a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" is exactly what we have lost to our great detriment. Restoring it requires a restoration of virtue which requires a large shift in focus from our current decadent ways. We should at least hold up the banner and proclaim the goal. It will not be advanced with silence.
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