Putting a “Happy Face” on Progessivism

Jefferson said “The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.” Well, the government has been working diligently over the past several years to keep up its end of the bargain by taking away "life" (legislated healthcare rationing) and "liberty" (promotion of Comprehensive Planning on the state and local level that separates property ownership rights from development rights).  If that were not enough, the government now seeks to eliminate all vestiges of our God-given rights, by taking away our individual "happiness" and replacing it with that of the collective. 

Case in point: Maryland’s state website has established a "Genuine Progress Indicator” that advocates for the adoption of the so-called “Happy Planet Index," developed by the New Economy Foundation (NEF) with support from Friends of the Earth.  To calculate the HPI, authors use the following equation: Life Satisfaction times Life Expectancy divided by the community's Ecological Footprint, as measured by environmental regulation. (see http://bit.ly/q8kbTx).  It is left to the reader to plumb the philosophical depths (the “dark” depths, I may add) of this thinking by visiting the link and exploring Maryland’s “happiness metrics,”  which not only describe the Happy Planet Index, but promote the concepts of “Gross National Happiness” and “Subjective Measures of Human Wellness.”  

The idea that government can define “happiness” much less use government resources to promote its secular, communal definition on a website should scare the hell out of any reasonably informed, freedom-loving American citizen.    In effect, the state of Maryland is attempting to put the final post-modernist nail in the Constitution’s coffin by hypothecating that ALL rights come from the state (man) and not man’s Creator: that is, rights are not individual, but collective. 

So, keep this in mind.  Using the HPI definition and simple math, if you have low life satisfaction and life-expectancy because the government makes you worker harder and longer in a job you do not like because it’s the only job you can find, you can help the planet as a whole by reducing your ecological footprint.