To the Editor:

Being on hand for Sen. Jeff Merkley’s town hall meeting in Canyon City I was gratified that none of the local citizens displayed the embarrassing incivility that has marred town hall meetings in other parts of the nation. Absent too was the implied threat of open display of guns by people whose IQ is less than their weapons’ caliber.

What I did find troubling though was such prevalence of distrust of government per se; that is, all government – any type, any form. Such sentiment seems craven disregard for the ponderous intellectual labors undertaken by the founders of this nation in formulating ours. The founders were mental giants, the best educated for their time, studied in history and inspired by Enlightenment philosophy to advance society beyond Medieval feudalism.

The anti-government sentiment today seems tainted with longing for a new type of feudalism: one of transnational corporatism taking the place of ruling crowns’ titled principalities of ages past. Dressed out in the rubric of free-market enterprise (laissez faire capitalism) the contention seems to be that “market force” is the ultimate expression of democracy, justifying complete dismantlement of government as regulator to corporations lest they become indifferent to the general well being of the nation and its citizens.

As applied doctrine, corporate “governance” narrows a person’s value from sovereign citizen to the purely mercantile classification of consumer/producer. Of course, the corporation’s “bottom line” will be the arbiter of how “value” is defined. Not different, really, from how the lords of Medieval feudalism chose to value serfs. So much for freedom from tyranny envisioned by the Founders; pursuit of happiness beyond market share calculations.

I urge proponents of this “new world order” to recognize that it isn’t new at all, but is instead exactly what our nation’s Founders were declaring independence from. The Tea Party in Boston Harbor, by-the-way, was essentially a protest against The East India Company; the corporation chartered by the British Crown and which acted as proxy arm of the Crown’s unrepresentative government over the colonies.

Storie Mooser

Prairie City