Posted on 01/28/2018 11:49:41 AM PST by huckfillary
My comments are in response to an article which appeared yesterday entitled, What Leftists Don’t Understand about Economics, by Daniel Carter, of Investment Watch. Link below.
Where do you want me to start? Liberals and their philosophical/political brethren understand little if anything about economics, and even less about the principles of Natural Law and Natural Rights which underscore free-market capitalism. Volumes have been written about Natural Rights beginning with Thales of Miletus in the 6th century B.C. He and the Seven Sages of Miletus, rather than the later Greeks Plato and Aristotle, are credited with giving philosophical birth to the Western Tradition. There is a straight philosophical line from Thales et al, to Aristotle, significantly to Aquinas who bridged Christian thought with Aristotelianism, to the Enlightenment philosophes and Founding Fathers, and finally to the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. Rand’s masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, has been rightfully called Aristotle’s Eudaemonics (or flourishing) in novel form. Having read both several times, I can confirm this comparison. That’s pretty much what it is.
Reduced to its essence, Natural Rights includes freedom of life, liberty, and property. In the Declaration, the pursuit of happiness was substituted for property. The pursuit of happiness, or flourishing, is the subject of Aristotle’s Eudaemonics. The closest English word for “eudaemonia” is “flourishing.” All agreed that flourishing is pre-supposed by ordered liberty. Man cannot rise to the occasion, or find meaning in his life, or soar on the wings of eagles without liberty, not anarchy, but ordered liberty. The state exists for one purpose–to protect one’s Natural Rightsto keep your own money—not your rights to take someone else’s money.
Also, the Ten Commandments have much to say about the primacy of Natural Rights and its place in our Judeo-Christian ethic. The Fifth Commandment (“Thou Shalt not Kill”) couldn’t make the right to life any clearer. Likewise, The Seventh Commandment (“Thou Shalt not Steal”) could not have come down more firmly on behalf of property rights.
Unfortunately, Natural Rights philosophy is no longer taught, or only in the darkened corner of a candlelit sanctuary. It is ignored or considered hate speech. It was long ago kicked under the bus by the Progressive Movement of Marx and Woodrow Wilson and the Frankfurt School of Irrational Thought.
If you aren’t schooled or steeped in liberty or the principles of Natural Law, you can neither appreciate nor understand nor defend the offspring of Natural Rights—free enterprise.
http://investmentwatchblog.com/what-leftists-dont-understand-about-economics/
Everything?
The following essay is reprinted with permission from Our Ageless Constitution, a Bicentennial Volume on the principles and ideas underlying the Constitution.
“Man … must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator.. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature…. This law of nature…is of course superior to any other…. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this: and such of them as are valid derive all their force…from this original.” – Sir William Blackstone (Eminent English Jurist)
The Founders DID NOT establish the Constitution for the purpose of granting rights. Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in order to secure each person’s Creator endowed rights to life, liberty, and property.
Only in America, did a nation’s founders recognize that rights, though endowed by the Creator as unalienable prerogatives, would not be sustained in society unless they were protected under a code of law which was itself in harmony with a higher law. They called it “natural law,” or “Nature’s law.” Such law is the ultimate source and established limit for all of man’s laws and is intended to protect each of these natural rights for all of mankind. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 established the premise that in America a people might assume the station “to which the laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them..”
Herein lay the security for men’s individual rights – an immutable code of law, sanctioned by the Creator of man’s rights, and designed to promote, preserve, and protect him and his fellows in the enjoyment of their rights. They believed that such natural law, revealed to man through his reason, was capable of being understood by both the ploughman and the professor. Sir William Blackstone, whose writings trained American’s lawyers for its first century, capsulized such reasoning:
“For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the…direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.”
What are those natural laws? Blackstone continued:
“Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due..”
The Founders saw these as moral duties between individuals. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him …. The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society . their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation.”
Americas leaders of 1787 had studied Cicero, Polybius, Coke, Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, among others, as well as the history of the rise and fall of governments, and they recognized these underlying principles of law as those of the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, and the deepest thought of the ages.
An example of the harmony of natural law and natural rights is Blackstone’s “that we should live honestly” – otherwise known as “thou shalt not steal” – whose corresponding natural right is that of individual freedom to acquire and own, through honest initiative, private property. In the Founders’ view, this law and this right were inalterable and of a higher order than any written law of man. Thus, the Constitution confirmed the law and secured the right and bound both individuals and their representatives in government to a moral code which did not permit either to take the earnings of another without his consent. Under this code, individuals could not band together and do, through government’s coercive power, that which was not lawful between individuals.
America’s Constitution is the culmination of the best reasoning of men of all time and is based on the most profound and beneficial values mankind has been able to fathom. It is, as William E. Gladstone observed, “The Most Wonderful Work Ever Struck Off At A Given Time By he Brain And Purpose Of Man.“
We should dedicate ourselves to rediscovering and preserving an understanding of our Constitution’s basis in natural law for the protection of natural rights – principles which have provided American citizens with more protection for individual rights, while guaranteeing more freedom, than any people on earth.
“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” -John Locke
all of it?
. . . wrote in the 1760s. Interesting fact.
Have you ever tried to rescue someone who is drowning?
They are afraid. There is no reasoning with them. They just want to climb on top of you to get away from the water.
That’s liberals/Democrats/socialists.
They start out as frightened people.
Then, they realize that they can’t fix everything, so they become angry.
Some, like the Clintons, then just work to become the most greedy, ruthless criminals they can be.
When people are responsible and can support themselves they don’t need them
Another "fact" which should be of interest for all of us is that Thomas Jefferson and the Board of the University of Virginia prescribed that the writings of Blackstone were to be used in the Law School of the University of Virginia.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States."Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"The smart crooks long ago figured out that getting themselves elected to federal office to make unconstitutional tax laws to fill their pockets is a much easier way to make a living than robbing banks." —me
"Federal career lawmakers probably laugh all the way to the bank to deposit bribes for putting loopholes for the rich and corporations in tax appropriations laws, Congress actually not having the express constitutional authority to make most appropriations laws where domestic policy is concerned. Such laws are based on stolen state powers and uniquely associated stolen state revenues." —me
Bleeding heart liberal politicians exploit low-information voters by using lies as a cattle prod to get themselves elected and reelected so that they can keep on harvesting the money tree.
The remedy …
Patriots need to finish the job that they started in the 2016 elections when they elected Trump president.
More specifically, patriots now need to be making sure that there are plenty of Trump-supporting, state sovereignty-respecting patriot candidates on the 2018 primary ballots, and pink-slip career lawmakers by sending patriot candidate lawmakers to DC on election day.
And until the states wake up and repeal the 17th Amendment, as evidenced by concerns about the integrity of Alabama's special Senate election, patriot candidates need to win elections by a large enough margin to compensate for possible deep state ballot box fraud and associated MSM scare tactics.
Hacking Democracy - The Hack
#9
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