We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The three schools of originalism are... incomplete at best. The framers did not intend to enable democracy simply through the Constitution's open-ended rights provisions, nor did they mean to constrain it just through those provisions; both Balkin and his libertarian-originalist counterparts simplify their claims too much. Rather, the framers wanted to enable democracy, but they wanted to enable it specifically by constraining its excesses — and thus the presumption-of-constitutionality originalists also oversimplify the political theory of the Constitution. No construction like a "presumption of liberty" or a "presumption of constitutionality" can reliably be used in determining original meaning because the framers had to make compromises among the ends of government and the three grounds of legitimacy.
Instead of reading the Constitution through the lens of a single theory of original meaning, we should simply read it with an awareness of its compromises and philosophic inconsistencies. This may actually be what a more complete and true originalism would entail — that we interpret the Constitution without resort to any modern construction, be it a presumption of liberty, of democracy, or of constitutionality.
The strength of the populists consists in a certain naïveté. They actually believe in “democracy.” And they are all mystical “nationalists” within their respective statist domains. They think that the nature of the modern State can be changed; that it would be possible, for instance, to downsize it, to reduce taxes, to maybe pay down some debt, to make the agencies of the State responsive to their individual customers, more reflective of human decency, &c. In power, they confront the reality, of machinery vastly large and complex, regulations fantastically detailed and comprehensive, all backed by the power of written law, to be enforced when necessary by violence. And being crass, the best they can do is empty their chamberpots into the machine, here and there. They prove rank amateurs, and upon their removal from office, the “natural party of government” returns, to make some minor sloppy repairs, then resume the mission of Nanny Statecraft — with ambitious new programmes and departments to reward dependency, and crush the spirit of liberty and enterprise; focusing their efforts to make sure that trouble does not arise from the same quarter again.
The citizen of every modern Nation State is fully integrated with that machinery: strapped into place and identifiable by serial number. There is nothing voluntary in his participation: the definition of an “outlaw” has been amended over time, to mean specifically failure to cooperate with any government agent, or to surrender immediately to his demands. (I laugh, bitterly, when a media smartie proposes e.g. mandatory voting, as if adding more idiots to the electorate will improve anything. And yet I welcome it as a frank admission that democracy is a totalitarian creed.)
“The point is, we are a big country,” says self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. “The VA sees six and a half million people a year. Are people going to be treated badly? Are some people going to die because of poor treatment in the VA? Yes, that is a tragedy and we have to get to the root of it.”
"Not every regulation or government program is doomed to fail. But we might consider the slightly terrifying possibility that when government does get something right, it does so by accident, temporarily, and for reasons that it cannot understand or replicate. This may be why the sheer volume of law and regulation has been climbing so rapidly: Intuiting its own inefficacy, Washington is throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Entity with Whom politicians sometimes confuse themselves needed only ten commandments, not the ten thousand a year that Washington produces. Some of those coming down in the near future will be intended to reform the VA. The rational thing to do would be to abolish it. We’d be far better off paying veterans’ medical bills out of the Treasury than trying to operate a network of hospitals and clinics. And no matter what Washington promises to do to solve this problem, it is a good bet that the policy enacted will not produce the result intended. Reform is a random walk."
Looks like Thomas Piketty fudged data to make his case. Not all that surprising, since we're familiar with how those on the Left love fudged data (cough, cough, East Anglia, cough).
It's also not surprising that the true believers still think there's value in his 'theoretical framework'.
"Old-fashioned Liberals" sound conservative these days, just as JFK would. The Harvard Bait & Switch: Prof. Harvey Silverglate on the University's Free Speech Fakery:
Camille Paglia is my favorite Lefty, feminist lesbian. A quote from Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues - The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.
Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).
Interview with the smart columnist David Harsanyi, a good American rebel.
He's entirely right: the US is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. He's is also right that democracy needs to be close to home or it loses its valence.
Apparently, the Chinese people who travel to Malaysia are doing so in reduced numbers due to the loss of Malaysian Air Flight 370. When I heard this I thought, "Well, nobody said people are rational."
My initial thinking was that air flight is still safe, so if the issue is safety, that's odd. My wife replied, "It's perfectly rational. They think the Malaysian government has mishandled this and they're punishing the government by not traveling."
At first, I thought this was a good reply, but then I thought again. It's still irrational. For two reasons.
The first is a soft reason. 'Punishing' a government is something we all need to do. Governments very rarely do anything right or useful. One could argue the corruption and mismanagement in China is so pervasive, it would do the Chinese tourists well to fix their own government first. I don't know what they are doing, but given the state of affairs there, one could reasonably argue 'not much'. The same is true here, in the U.S., for us. It's a reasonable point, but it doesn't fully make a strong case for how irrational the Malaysian tourism behavior is.
The second reason is that the tourism isn't really hurting the government. Boycotts real people and businesses and rarely send a message to governments. People and businesses who had nothing to do with the missing plane or the mismanagement of the search are impacted. These people rely on tourists, particularly wealthy Chinese, to maintain themselves and their businesses. While it's true this impacts the Malaysian government in terms of taxes, and it could lead to a reversal for the ruling party in the next election. This may impact the current politicians, but is unlikely to yield any meaningful reform. Most importantly, along these lines, it's not expected to be long-lasting. For any meaningful impact, behavior like this would have to be consistent over time.
In the past, I've been guilty of thinking along similar lines when a foreign government didn't do something I thought was right. Over time, I've learned, assuming the government is the people is the wrong attitude. The two are frequently very different things. Chinese tourists may feel better about themselves by not traveling to Malaysia, but it's odd to think they are having any kind of impact, except on the business owners who rely on the stream of visitors they usually get.
Why should they be treated any differently? It boggles the mind. As Taranto notes:
That resolves the conundrum we noted atop this column. Fringe political speech like flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades is so broadly unappealing as to have no effect on "the will of the people." The same is true of nonpolitical forms of expression such as pornography, violent video games and depictions of animal cruelty. (Breyer's willingness to countenance restrictions of the first two has to do with the protection of children, not of the body politic.)
Only mainstream political expression has the potential to thwart the "collective" will, and thus, in the view of Breyer and his fellow dissenters, it alone is deserving of restriction on such a rationale. That stands the First Amendment on its head. Its purpose may be to "make government responsive," as Wilson argued, but the means by which it does so is the limitation of government power and protection of individual freedom.
So only political speech requires adult restrictions? Not commercial speech, not speech of the press and the MSM, not porn, not commercial advertising, just political speech of individuals?
Why not limit those Viagra ad budgets, for the children of course.
Even if this is all un-American and strange, it seems hardly partisan since the very wealthy tend to support the Leftist control freaks. What's up with all of this? And what the heck is "the collective will"? There is no collective will except nominally and only in totalitarian states.
Let's face it: When politics and government are too important, freedom is in trouble.
As we have pointed out here, there is far more white poverty than black poverty in the US. It's not about skin tone.
Truth is, poverty is not a unitary phenomenon, and it's not all a problem. There are hundreds of sorts of poverty: poverty by life-style choice, poverty by location choice, poverty by bad luck, poverty by illness, mental illness, and addiction, poverty by personality traits or weak character, poverty from long-term unemployment, temporary poverty, poverty from being in grad school, poverty from being improvident, new immigrant poverty, poverty from having been in jail, poverty from being embedded in a poverty culture, poverty from trying to live on Social Security, poverty from being a single parent (a life-style choice, I suppose), fraudulent poverty from cash businesses and illegal activities, and so forth. It's not all a collective "societal problem."
Why don't the pundits talk about that? They never do. Even Charles Murray doesn't. I'd like to see a statistical break-down, but it doesn't exist. Worse yet, poverty stats fail to include government or charitable benefits so I am skeptical about all of it.
America offers great freebies even for those for whom poverty is a life-style choice because we do not let people starve in the streets, without shelter. Need a cell phone? We even have Obamaphones. America is a great country in which to be poor.
The astonishing wealth of the West, more widely distributed than in any other civilization, the abandonment of religion as the foundation of morals and virtues, the transformation of political freedom into self-centered license, and the commodification of hedonism that makes available to everyman luxuries and behaviors once reserved for a tiny elite, have made self-indulgence and the present more important than self-sacrifice and the future.
Declining birthrates, a preference for spending on social welfare transfers rather than on defense, and a willingness to beggar our children and grandchildren with debt in order to finance these entitlements– all bespeak a people whose wealth deludes them into thinking that they can imprudently ignore the future and indefinitely afford these luxuries that in fact insidiously weaken the foundations of our social and political order. This process is more advanced in Europe than in the U.S., but we in America have been steadily moving towards the same mentality.
I swim at my own risk routinely. I drink a couple of Coronas with limes, then jump off the boat in the middle of Nantucket Sound to swim with the Bluefish and the sharks. Good fun. I also will drive my boat through tough summer squalls just for the challenge and thrill of it.
I was thinking about my post a week or so ago about federally-subsidized flood insurance, and why it provoked so much response. I am not insensitive to the pain, chaos, and tragedy of seeing one's home damaged or destroyed. However, I want to focus on the policy issue which, in effect, enables - encourages - these things to happen.
Why? Because it seems to me that it's a provocative issue not so much about flooding but because it is related to the proper role of government vis a vis the private sector and the power of nature - and of human-nature - itself.
Government interventions usually distort markets, sometimes in the ways government policy hopes they will and, very frequently, with unintended (but predictable if you have half a brain) consequences. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent huge bucks over the years on Mississippi levees to prevent flooding. As a result, Delta farmlands in states like Mississippi no longer receive their regular dose of nutrients, flooding is worse when it does occur, and the environmental and property damage to the Louisiana delta is ongoing. It's entirely predictable. The levees prevent the mighty river from using its flood plains - and much of New Orleans was constructed, foolishly, but they didn't care at the time - below sea level.
Before LBJ passed federally-subsidized flood insurance, construction in flood-prone areas was limited to those who were able to obtain (expensive, and rightly-so) private flood insurance, or people who didn't care. People who built on beachfront, near marshes or river flood plains, tornado alley, etc., expected the worse to occur sooner or later, and took the risk or bought insurance on the free market. Before then (and before wetlands protection laws), construction on wetlands landfill (now illegal) or near beaches and rivers was at your own risk, mostly. "Acts of God" were excluded from homeowner's insurance without additional riders and naturally, flood-prone areas also had lower property values to reflect the risk and the occasional unpleasantness.)
Federally-subsidized flood insurance (designed to subsidize developers doing risky water-proximate construction) has had the effect of encouraging reckless behavior and, at the same time, enabled the development of fragile and ever-changing water-related habitats that would have been better left alone.
But what does the developer care? He builds, sells, profits, and leaves. Eventually, water goes wherever it wants to go and every human knows that. The consequence of living near water is that Nor'easters like Sandy, hurricanes, etc. are more damaging to property than they have have been historically in the US. Historically, for examples, Sandy Hook, New Jersey, waterfront, the Rockaways, and the North Carolina barrier beaches had, at most, rustic shacks which washed away with every big storm.Now, people build permanent residences and complain to the government when they get washed away or flooded out.
Risk is incentivized by not paying free market rates. Risky life choices (eg smoking, living in a forest-fire area, DUIs, drug abuse, having a home without fire alarms and fire-extinguishers, sky-diving, having a home with antiquated electric, living 50 miles from a fire department, piloting small airplanes, mountain-climbing, driving race cars, etc etc) have a market cost reflecting the risk taken and most of the time they do when people chose to buy insurance. Actuaries are statistical geniuses and very good at calculating and costing-out the risks of almost everything people do - which is why they make big bucks. In free markets, you can insure anything if you want to. Lloyd's will even insure an opera diva's larynx.
My solution to federally-subsidized flood insurance is similar to what my solution would be to many government-induced unintended negative consequences: phase government out of the way entirely and let free markets and nature work their will. Much misery and catastrophe would be eliminated that way in the long run. It's not about compassion. It's about facing reality honestly.
(NB: I am opposed to government wildfire suppression so I guess this makes me an environmental radical, or something heartless. The local fire department is fine with me, however, so you cannot call me an anarchist. I also oppose the mortgage interest tax deduction. Just a covert subsidy to the construction biz.)
“What all the [ideological crusades of the twentieth-century] have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their very different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government....[S]everal key elements have been common to most of them:
1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole of society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes....(p.5)
What is remarkable is how few arguments are really engaged in, and how many substitutes for arguments there are. This vision so permeates the media and academia, and has made such major inroads into the religious community, that many grow into adulthood unaware that there is any other way of looking at things, or that evidence might be relevant to checking out the sweeping assumptions of so-called "thinking people". Many of these "thinking people" could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes. (p. 6)”
I haven't asked Bird Dog if our government researcher has been embedded yet. It's been quite a while since Zachriel showed himself around here, and he's the closest thing to an enforcer we've ever had.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to read this is how far we've sunk. Obama's true colors continue to show as the economy slumps further.
Sultan's piece that we linked this morning, Our State of Police, is a stimulating one. I had never thought about these things from this angle before. One quote:
"Oppressing everyone to avoid oppressing anyone is the egalitarian ethos gone mad."
Of course, we are talking about the sorts of insoluble problems that arise in a non-totalitarian society, problems rooted in the many "flaws" in human nature. Another quote:
The left can't fix the social problems that, in some cases its welfare state helped cause. It certainly can't fix those that predate its intervention. Its efforts are all the more hopeless because it attributes the cause to its usual suspects of capitalism and intolerance so that it never addresses the problems, instead it uses people from failed societies as ammo in a cultural war. The right's tactics temporarily contain the worst of the violence, but not its expansion or its causes.
No society or culture can be conflict-free, nor can even any family or tribe or anything. We must be humble when thinking about "solutions" of all sorts. It has been said that Conservatives like me temperamentally embrace the Tragic View of life as contrasted with utopian views, and there is something to that. It is, indeed, the story of man's fall - broken from the very start.
From a brief, important, and depressing essay