Davis Merritt: If common good is a myth, so is Constitution

The 23,000 or so people who vote in Richard Ranzau’s Sedgwick County Commission district are gradually finding out what he really believes, and the 12,000 of them who put him into office should be feeling voters’ remorse.

Certainly many people in the county’s other districts are watching with growing concern as they are shown in growing detail his pinched vision of American democracy.

Chairman Ranzau and the other members of the commission’s three-man far-right majority, Jim Howell and Karl Peterjohn, last month repeatedly cited a financial crisis as the reason for sharp cutbacks in several county programs, including public health. The truth, however, emerged last week when Ranzau preached to the conservative choir at a Wichita Pachyderm Club meeting.

“We can give you a rationale for every decision that we made, and I have to say the vast majority of them should be made regardless of whether or not we had a budget deficit.”

And why was that the case?

“We’re trying to restore core American values to Sedgwick County,” he said.

He also said that “the county … has moved so far left that we don’t even recognize core American values.”

So what are those lost “American values”?

“It’s about the individual. Don’t try and give me collective solutions to my problems because sometimes things you perceive as a problem really isn’t from my perspective.” The Pachyderms applauded the sentiment, if not the grammar.

So the cuts of funding for “quality of life” programs such as the Sedgwick County Zoo and the Wichita Arts Council – as well as to public health – were in fact ideological. According to Ranzau, fully funding the Arts Council would have “completely disenfranchised” taxpayers who wouldn’t want their tax dollars going to it.

But so would someone morally opposed to war be “completely disenfranchised” by a president, heaven forbid, starting a war. Governing, after all, involves elected officials making sometimes tough decisions based on what they judge to be for the common good, doesn’t it?

Well, not so much in Ranzau’s world, apparently.

“I would argue that the common good is actually a myth, but nevertheless that was the justification (of earlier ‘collectivist’ governments), to do what’s best for everybody and the individual didn’t matter.

“The government exists to protect our individual rights. Individual property rights are the key, and we need to protect them as strongly as we can.”

So Ranzau, who at the time of the budget cuts conflated himself with all county taxpayers (“The scary subtext to Ranzau’s Spirit outburst,” Aug. 11 Opinion), has an even more constricted view of government and society than previously understood by most Sedgwick County residents.

For me at the time, his presuming to be insulted on behalf of all taxpayers and to speak for all of them reflected an “alarming arrogance and a lack of understanding of and re-spect for the governing process.”

What’s now crystal clear is his limited vision of “core American values” and his disdain for a balance between “the common good” and “individual rights.”

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution does an admirable job of explaining why “the government exists,” to use Ranzau’s formulation: “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.…”

That’s a far broader agenda than simply protecting individual rights.

This story was originally published August 31, 2015 at 7:05 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: If common good is a myth, so is Constitution."