What Are They Smoking

NRO ^ | 10/28/2003 | Deroy Murdock

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Again, who defines "the good of society?"

[Hemingway's Ghost]

Pretty damn good.

[robertpaulsen]

I agree.

[MrLeRoy]

robertpaulsen agrees with you.

[robertpaulsen]

The fact that the 4th amendment worked just fine for 200 years and only recently has been called into question tells me the problem lies not with the amendment but with the fairly recent interpretation.

I suppose you blame the founders for the wording of the Commerce Clause or for the penumbras found in the emanations of the due process clause which, as a "right to privacy", protects abortions (or sodomy) from federal or state sanctions.

The wording is just fine.

[Just another Joe]

The fact that the 4th amendment worked just fine for 200 years and only recently has been called into question tells me the problem lies not with the amendment but with the fairly recent interpretation.

The "Living Constitution" argument.
I tend to agree with you that it is the recent interpretations that have failed, not the amendment itself but why did the interpretations come about?
The WOD. That tells me that something with that particular initiative stinks.

[robertpaulsen]

"robertpaulsen agrees with you."

In your dreams.

I agreed with headsonpikes' statement in post #153.

[headsonpikes]

You are a gentleman, and a scholar, sir!

;^)

[nina0113]

Now, you can't even buy a hemp necklace legally because it may contain an infinitesimal amount of THC.

All the craft stores I go to sell it on reels for making your own. I'm not into that hippy-dippy macrame junk jewelry myself (can you tell?) but I've always joked - "if you get tired of it, you can smoke it!"

[Hemingway's Ghost]

The fact that the 4th amendment worked just fine for 200 years and only recently has been called into question tells me the problem lies not with the amendment but with the fairly recent interpretation.

Really? You don't say.

I suppose you blame the founders for the wording of the Commerce Clause or for the penumbras found in the emanations of the due process clause which, as a "right to privacy", protects abortions (or sodomy) from federal or state sanctions.

No, I blame statist-oriented politicians, lawyers, judges, and other assorted power mongers for expanding and stretching the meaning of the Commerce Clause into something the Founding Fathers clearly never intended it to mean. Further, I blame righteous types such as you for not only allowing it to happen, but cheerleading for it, esp. w/r/t the War on Drugs.

[headsonpikes]

...classic liberalism tempered by reason and the good of society.

I would respond that too often, 'tempered by reason' translates to the imposition of some reductionist scheme on human society.

And the 'good of society' too often translates into the politico-economic good of a power-holding faction.

IMO, classical liberalism has been 'tempered by reason'; indeed, it was the application of reason to the study of history that led to the creation of 'classical liberalism' through the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries. And it has certainly been for the 'good of society' that America enjoyed such governance for the first 150 years of the Republic - we are still living off that political moral capital, imo.

[robertpaulsen]

"classical liberalism has been 'tempered by reason'"

I disagree. Laws that are based solely on the concept of "force or fraud" leave no room for reason or reasonableness.

The 'pureness', the metrics if you will, of such laws are what attracts people to the philosophy which embraces it.

Reasonableness is a messy concept. Ask HG.

[headsonpikes]

As you well know, classical liberalism is not the same thing as objectivism, from whence comes the 'force or fraud' slogan.

Again, unfortunate reductionism, imo.

'Reasonableness is a messy concept', perhaps; but not so messy as to include the egregious perversion of the Commerce clause to control household activities.

Lines can be drawn, in places. ;^)

[MrLeRoy]

On what bases other than force or fraud does classical liberalism approve of government action?

[headsonpikes]

I am chary of reducing any human event, whether personal or historical to a mere instance of some closed explanatory model.

While granting that combatting 'force and fraud' seems to capture the thrust of liberal governance, it is still an ad hoc exercise to explain a whole series of historical events by means of a formula.

Human life and human motives are far too complex to ever be truly summed up in a nutshell, imo.