WHAT WOULD HITLER & CHURCHILL SAY?

Hitler and Churchill were both wrong...!

You won't hear their names during today's clash in Washington over limited-government vs big government. And yet if today's Congress knew their history as well as their party talking-points, they'd see the connection. Churchill most eloquently defended the first when he said democracy was better than the alternatives, while Hitler most dramatically preached the second when he said democracies were too divisive to survive.

It could be said no one in Washington, on either side, stands as tall in history as these two warriors. Instead, today's combatants are busy with budgets, balances and deficits, Matters more of bookkeeping than of destiny. And yet they might do well to reassess their passions for or against strong central government.

Hitler mesmerized and galvanized 60 million Germans into saluting the power of the "one" over the "many." He scoffed at the "weakness of debate versus the power of leadership." He saw the "little become strong when they gave their souls to the state."

Churchill, later joined by FDR, spoke of Hitlerism as "the darkness over the land which crushes the liberty of the individual under the boot of government." And when -- six bloody years and 60 million lives later -- the Allies claimed victory, they claimed two of them. One of arms. The other of ideas.

History is always written by the winners. And so many can say WWII proved tyrannical central governments are doomed to eventually fall of their own weight (for current details see the USSR, Iraq,Tunisia and Egypt). However, the losers can say it was not democracy that defeated the authoritarian states of Germany and Japan; it was simply a matter of numbers, the extraordinary size and relentless quantity of Allied arms.

Historians can debate the matter. But there is one matter beyond debate. This country has become what it is by choosing NEITHER side in this anti-pro government debate. Instead, we've taken something from BOTH. A stubborn defense of limited government (eg. the free-wheeling capitalists who built the world's greatest industrial Goliath) at the very same time a shrewd use of big government (eg. the subsidies & tariffs from the federal bureaucrats who helped feed the Goliath).

Somewhere in the heat of 2011 Washington there are those with the light of this fact. You can usually spot them, because they're the ones trying to be heard when they say: "The choice here is not one or the other, but both..."