Unforseen consequences.

This is an interesting little piece on the changes in Canada since the 1960's.  It has a killer last paragraph:

The legacy of the three wise men [Jean Marchand,  Gerard Pelletier, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau] isn't less significant for being ironic. Separatism hasn't been defeated as a political idea in Canada. On the contrary, it has spread from Quebec to points west. It's liberalism that has been defeated. By now, it's been replaced by a culture of statism within the ruling Liberal party. Ideas have consequences, though not necessarily the ones intended.

Using liberalism in the classic sense, the author touches on a subject near and dear to my heart.  Today's Left is not "liberal".  Today's socialists are not "socialists" as the word was coined way back when.  The all powerful State is their concern, the care and feeding of it their purpose. 

In today's ass-backward media world conservatives are the classical liberals, trying to wrest freedoms back from the State while the Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Leftists have abandoned their traditional beliefs and become command economy totalitarians.  They are Progressing toward total state oversight of all social matters and most private ones.  The names have been changed in an effort to protect the guilty.

Those of us who don't like being overseen by desk pilots need to get our act together and defeat these people, first in the public arena of ideas and finally at the polls.  As the author says, there is no middle ground when the choices are freedom or tyranny.

The Phantom