Tibor on Common Good, Government, and Respect

Philosopher Tibor Machan has recently posted several brief items worth reading:

• Society isn't Government - critical of conservatives (e.g., David Brooks of the NYT, who regularly conflate society and government.
• Respect our Enemies - Why? - critical of comments from physicist Freeman Dyson who defended the somewhat cliche notion that we can't understand our enemies unless we "respect" them as human beings.
• The Common Good - critical of many who continue to misunderstand and misuse the usually vague, and almost never correctly defined, notion of "the Common Good".

From this third one I'll quote for you the following two paragraphs:

In most countries throughout human history the idea was promoted that there is a rich common good, a whole slew of objectives that we all must pursue. In other words, the common good was really the collective goods of all the people, as if they really did share goods galore that they needed to promote. The one size fits all mentality was encouraged by rulers, monarchs, tsars, and the rest who needed to hoodwink us into thinking that their goals are really our goals and we cannot really, individually, have goals of our own. That was the common good—the leaders’ good peddled for the rest as their good, too.

The American Founders, guided by the classical liberal social-political philosophies of John Locke and Co., saw through this. They realized that in a big country, the millions of inhabitants, citizens, share but very few goods. (Of course, small associations—churches, clubs, corporations, professional groups and so forth—can have some common objectives all right. It is only that no such common good or objective exists for the millions of us!) And the most important—probably, in fact, only—common good we share is the protection of our individual rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It’s the one good that’s indeed good for us all, that we have in common.