Tuesday.....International.....Thomas Sowell On "Tyranny"

The Times of London ran a comic where Barack Obama was kicking a soccer ball with BP on it. On his uniform was written Mid Term Elections Inc. A recent Pew poll showed that over 80% of British people have a lot or some confidence in President Obama, while most of the rest have little or no confidence in him, but that poll was released on June 17th and probably taken weeks before that...before the BP shakedown. Maybe the British people can now understand a little bit better why the American people are not so enamored with our President? It goes beyond Barack Obama, to all those who share his political philosophy and put him into office. They are takers, for they will take from anyone who cannot help them and give to anyone who can help them. Plato wrote: This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. Thomas Sowell used the word tyranny today in his column of which I will reprint portions of here. The entirety of the article can be read at www.tsowell.com.
   When Adolph Hiltler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics. Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.....a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even to survive. In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes.....Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation?  Nowhere. And yet that is precisely what is happening with the $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill.....If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion- or $50 billion or $100 billion-then so be it. But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without "due process of law." Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference......If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don't believe in Constitutional government. And without Constitutional government, freedom cannot endure......The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP's money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest in a  long line of presidentially appointed "csars" controlling different parts of the economy without even having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are. 
I did a number of individual chapter reviews of Thomas Sowell's great book Intellectuals And Society. He not only knows tyranny when he encounters it, he knows how and why it develops in the first place, and who is most likely to embark in that area.