Libertarian Thread #2: We Shall Never Die!

My buddy from work says he is now running against the unopposed Democratic incumbent mayor or Raeford.  He called the Libertarian Headquarters here and got the nomination over the phone.

"Well, if you really want it, you've got it." 

I didn't realize he had called himself a libertarian. I just call him overrated. 

Who was that? I didn't see most of the commercials. 

Okay Slart here's some specifics that I feel worthy of actually responding to.

Slartibartfast wrote: General George Washington was particularly contemptuous of this concept of “state sovereignty” because he had watched his soldiers freeze and starve when the states reneged on promised contributions to the Continental Army.

No doubt Washington favored a stronger central government, but one would really need to source that he was contemptuous of the state sovereignty, especially for such a reason. It would be more acurrate to say that he favored a strong federal army because of this reason, which he certainly did. For all his contempt of state sovereignty, he had no trouble using State militias in lieu of the federal army during his presidency particularly in quelling tax rebellions.

wrote: Despite some moral compromises like tolerating slavery – and despite decades of struggle against forces that objected to the dominant power of the federal government – the Constitution has worked pretty much as the Founders intended. It has proved, by and large, to be a flexible governing arrangement that enabled the United States to adapt to changes and to emerge as the world’s leading nation.

How could you even really pretend to source this? The Constitution worked so well every thing written in it has been broken, some completely forgotten about. I'm sure they would be super pleased about that. Again, using "the Founders" the author is really committing a terrible error since views were hardly homogeneous.

Earlier political attacks on the Constitution were more frontal – such as the Nullificationists in the 1830s and the secessionists of the Confederacy in the early 1860s – essentially reasserting the states’ independence that had been lost in the drafting and ratification of the Constitution.

This is very misleading. It for one seems to insinuate that States were not sovereign under the Constitution. Even after the Civil War, which signified the largest destruction of State sovereignty from a single event since the adoption of the Constitution, the Supreme Court in Chae Chang Ping v United States admitted that States are independent players except in foreign relations where they act as the single entity, the United States of America.

It has become a touchstone of the American Right that the Founders wanted a weak central government and were big-time advocates of states’ rights. Tea Partiers also dress up in Revolutionary War costumes and pretend that the enemy of that time must have been Philadelphia, not London. They seem to think that their coiled-snake “Don’t Tread on Me” flag was aimed at fellow Americans, not the British.

Yeah he's kind of annoying that at that point, the Americans were fellow British since, you know, they were a part of Britain.

In the real history, the banner that addressed the American colonists was one devised by Franklin showing a snake cut into pieces, representing the colonies/states with the warning, “Join, or Die.”

Yes, except that the banner represented a war time alliance to cast of Britain, not a call for unification as a single government. See hundreds of other wars in world history for similar examples.

And, the whole point of giving the U.S. central government control over interstate commerce was so the country could implement national solutions to national problems. That was why even a conservative U.S. Appeals Court judge, Laurence Silberman, ruled recently that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was constitutional, because he recognized that Congress has broad powers to devise responses to challenges that impact the nation’s commerce.

A modern conservative judge ruled that way because that was Madison's intention? That's a tenuous assertion. Actually, the interpretation itself disagrees with Madison's own writings on the subject as well as pre-Gibbons jurisprudence. The general understanding at the time was the the phrase "to regulate", meant "to make regular". That's pretty obvious from the literature at the time, but I'm not sure why to word was used like that. Most archived dictionaries from the time period seem to omit the word "regulate". It appears in one written at the dawn of the 19th century where it essentially has our modern meaning except the language seems to imply minor changes.

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states, “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” But the Right’s historical revisionists miss the key point here.

I would just like to point out that nearly the same wording appears in the AoC, but the author uses that wording to demonstrate the lack of power federal power imbued in the AoC. It seems like a minor contradiction. Later on he points out how different the wording is. It's different really only in zeal. The loss of identification in foreign affairs pretty much accounts for the dropping of the wording. He seems to think it helps his case. I would say it hurts him.

The Constitution already had granted broad powers to the federal government – including regulation of national commerce – so there were far fewer powers left for the states. The Tenth Amendment amounted to a minor concession to mollify the anti-federalist bloc that unsuccessfully sought to block ratification of the Constitution by the 13 states.

Far fewer than... what? He means far fewer than the AoC. Nobody will disagree that the States had much more power under the Articles, but that does not say anything about their total amount of power. The Constitution does not delegate many powers to the Federal government. He's not making a good argument here. Also, the 10th amendment, and rest of the bill of rights, were hardly minor concession. He says this as if the anti-federalist wing constituted some minor fringe of the convention filled with morons who would be appeased by a meaningless amendment.

But the current irony of the Right’s revisionist history on the Constitution is that it comes at a time when the financial crisis in Europe – and its inability to adopt a comprehensive regional solution – underscores the wisdom of America’s Founders to create a strong national government.

He should just stick to history.

Edited by Equality 7-2521 - January 31 2012 at 08:30

Hahaha treason. Imagine a world where every voluntary organization (as supposedly our government is) could hang people for the high crime of doing something that makes that organization less powerful. Actually though, the Constitution gives fairly narrow and somewhat reasonable conditions for treason.

I mean treason can be a crime. If I murder a Senator, that could be treason under the given circumstances (in the old sense of the word as murder of one from a higher socio-political class it would be the exact definition), but the murder was the crime. There is no additional crime of treason. There is nothing that makes it worse than me murdering a civilian. You could say the same thing about wartime examples. If I told China how to circumvent the US missile defense system so that China could firebomb NYC, I would be committing treason and essentially mass murder. The former means nothing. It would be no different of a situation than me as an American telling my government how to get past China's missile defense system to fire bomb Hong Kong.

Epignosis wrote: The T wrote: I might love freedom and all that but I wouldn't mind if all girls who made the duck face where shot... Someone else was doing it first.

I wouldn't suffer so much if I had to shot Jimmy Page

Epignosis wrote: Libertarian free market economics would see socialism go away for everyone- rich, poor, and in between.  The irony is this: It's because government got involved in the first place that we have the messes we have.

Saying that would require knowledge of an alternate timeline. The government may not have helped any, but the government didn't overestimate salvage values by 300% and other such nonsense. There is no reason to believe that such a collapse could not occur in a totally free market.


Edited by Gamemako - January 30 2012 at 18:10

Equality 7-2521 wrote: Epignosis wrote: I am teaching the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution this week. Even after reading the first two paragraphs of the former, many of my students, when asked "Who gives you your rights?" replied "The government."  One student asked how much it costs to have a baby.  I gave the figures for my two children.  Another girl, who is evidently also a mother (double ), the one who is a Democrat because that's what her "people is," said her birth was free because she has Medicaid.  I asked her if she knew how Medicaid worked.  She said, "They pay for everythang."  I asked, "Who is 'they?'"  Raising her voice, she said, "The Medicaid Company!  I look on the paper and it say Medicaid!"  I informed her how much money is taken from my family each month to pay for Medicaid.  "Oh well," she said, bobbing her head and making the duck face. I feel so great about pubic education.  I'm amazed you actually got them to read to paragraphs.

Oh, I didn't.  I got a few people to read and the rest glanced at their books once in a while if I was lucky.

The T wrote: I might love freedom and all that but I wouldn't mind if all girls who made the duck face where shot...

Someone else was doing it first. 

 

I am teaching the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution this week.

Even after reading the first two paragraphs of the former, many of my students, when asked "Who gives you your rights?" replied "The government." 

One student asked how much it costs to have a baby.  I gave the figures for my two children.  Another girl, who is evidently also a mother (double ), the one who is a Democrat because that's what her "people is," said her birth was free because she has Medicaid.  I asked her if she knew how Medicaid worked.  She said, "They pay for everythang."  I asked, "Who is 'they?'"  Raising her voice, she said, "The Medicaid Company!  I look on the paper and it say Medicaid!"  I informed her how much money is taken from my family each month to pay for Medicaid.  "Oh well," she said, bobbing her head and making the duck face.

I feel so great about pubic education.