Editor, Gazette-Journal:
When I opened the Letters section of the Gazette last Wednesday and read the responses to my letter from the week before, I couldn’t suppress my laughter.
One reader turned a misplaced comma into an assault on the Constitution. Another questioned the motives of their fellow citizens organizing around a notion of “the common good,” casting them as elitists who think themselves superior as opposed to simply good citizens wishing to do their community well.
Yet another cited Adolf Hitler as their intellectual source for collectivism as the outcome of the politics of “the common good.”
This all flies in the face, however, of what the Founders actually wrote and said. Actions for the benefit of the “common good” are scattered throughout The Federalist Papers: Number 57 (written by either Hamilton or Madison), for example makes it clear: “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and...