Posted on 01/04/2002 5:34:10 AM PST by tberry
The Myth of 'Limited Government'
by Joseph Sobran
We are taught that the change from monarchy to democracy is progress; that is, a change from servitude to liberty. Yet no monarchy in Western history ever taxed its subjects as heavily as every modern democracy taxes its citizens.
But we are taught that this condition is liberty, because "we" are – freely – taxing "ourselves." The individual, as a member of a democracy, is presumed to consent to being taxed and otherwise forced to do countless things he hasn’t chosen to do (or forbidden to do things he would prefer not to do).
Whence arises the right of a ruler to compel? This is a tough one, but modern rulers have discovered that a plausible answer can be found in the idea of majority rule. If the people rule themselves by collective decision, they can’t complain that the government is oppressing them. This notion is summed up in the magic word "democracy."
It’s nonsense. "We" are not doing it to "ourselves." Some people are still ruling other people. "Democracy" is merely the pretext for authorizing this process and legitimizing it in the minds of the ruled. Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept.
Now comes Hans-Hermann Hoppe, of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, to explode the whole idea that there can ever be a just state. And he thinks democracy is worse than many other forms of government. He makes his case in his new book Democracy – The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order
Hoppe is often described as a libertarian, but it might be more accurate to call him a conservative anarchist. He thinks the state – "a territorial monopoly of compulsion" – is inherently subversive of social health and order, which can thrive only when men are free.
As soon as you grant the state anything, Hoppe argues, you have given it everything. There can be no such thing as "limited government," because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power (and can simply expand its own power).
We’ve tried. We adopted a Constitution that authorized the Federal Government to exercise only a few specific powers, reserving all other powers to the states and the people. It didn’t work. Over time the government claimed the sole authority to interpret the Constitution, then proceeded to broaden its own powers ad infinitum and to strip the states of their original powers – while claiming that its self-aggrandizement was the fulfillment of the "living" Constitution. So the Constitution has become an instrument of the very power it was intended to limit!
The growth of the Federal Government might have been slowed if the states had retained the power to withdraw from the confederation. But the Civil War established the fatal principle that no state could withdraw, for any reason. So the states and the people lost their ultimate defense against Federal tyranny. (And if they hadn’t, there would still have been the problem of the tyranny of individual states.) But today Americans have learned to view the victory of the Union over the states, which meant an enormous increase in the centralization of power, as a triumph of "democracy."
Hoppe goes so far as to say that democracy is positively "immoral," because "it allows for A and B to band together to rip off C." He argues that monarchy is actually preferable, because a king has a personal interest in leaving his kingdom in good condition for his heirs; whereas democratic rulers, holding power only briefly, have an incentive to rob the public while they can, caring little for what comes afterward. (The name "Clinton" may ring a bell here.)
And historically, kings showed no desire to invade family life; but modern democracies want to "protect" children from their parents. By comparison with the rule of our alleged equals, most kings displayed remarkably little ambition for power. And compared with modern war, the wars of kings were mere scuffles.
Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
January 4, 2001
The major role of government in the support of scientific research one of the greatest threats to American science today.
There is Charles Murray's principle:
When you subsidize something, you get more of it and the cost goes up."
Because of the availability of government reseach grants, and the limited effectiveness of review procedures in determining that grants go the those most likely to achieve significant results, scientists of marginal ability who would otherwise have been satisfied with the "fat, lazy slumbers" of academia pursue a career as a reseach scientist in parallel with their academic career. The result is that journals fill up with crap, libraries are forever running out of room to house them and the serious scientist finds it nearly impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Perhaps even more serious is the fact that granting agencies tend to be dominated by one scientific point of view (not necessarily reflecting the current administration's view) where there are political repercussions, and research not reflectiong that view is unlikely to be supported. For example, it is my impression that meteorological research by someone not supporting the existence of global warming and the major role in it of human activity would not be likely to be funded. There are other examples,(even in paleontology) but this is too long already. I would say that the granting agencies are likely to be made up predominately of people with liberal political views.
Historically, scientific innovations are generally produced by younger people. But young scientists are the most likely to be in need of research grants to supplement their incomes, and thus will be under pressure to adjust the reseach goals to be politically correct, where that may be relevant. This is very bad for science.
Hardly. It took a state matter and made it a federal one. And ever since, the feds have been passing bills mandating special treatment for women going to abortion clinics, such as limiting what protestors can do around clinics - once again, that would typically be more of a state issue than a federal one.
"1)internet " = Private
"2)post office " = Being replaced by private internet
"3)railroads" = Worst of industrialized nations
"4)airports" = stifled by federal regulation
"7)cleaner air and water " = Fabricated excuse for federal regulation
"8)all sorts of materials, metals, business methods" = Private enterprise
"all kinds of medical breakthroughs " = Private enterprise hindered by federal regulation.
"10)public education and great public universities" = Bastions of liberal revisionist history and brainwashing.
Here is one, a particularly egregious one:
Texas v. White (74 US 700). The state of Texas sought an injunction to restrain the defendants from using Texas Indemnity Bonds paid to them by Texas after secession for supplies for the Confederate States of America and to obtain the restoration of fifty-one of the bonds. The defense argued that Texas, by seceding from the Union and later waging a war against the United States, had lost the status of a state in the Union and therefore had no right to sue in the United States Supreme Court. The state of Texas argued that the Union was indestructable and that Texas's status in the Union therefore had been unchanged by the war. In a 5 to 3 decision issued on April 15, 1869 the Supreme Court found for the state of Texas. Chief Justice Chase, writing for the majority, wrote:
"When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into a indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The Act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the Union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through consent of the States.
Sad, but OH so true! LOL!!!
I thought it was created by Al Gore.
Thanks for your help.
Ah, that old commerce clause. The bane of lovers of freedom everywhere. The impetus behind so much that is unconstitutional.
The commerce clause was put into place for one reason, and one reason only. To make sure that when one state shipped products to another state that it would not be taxed in any state it happened to pass through on it's journey. This was to ensure two things. That their power to regulate foreign commerce could not be abrogated by simply shipping foreign products to a more favorable state, and to "ensure the domestic tranquality" by ensuring that trade between states was fairly taxed. Read the debates of the Constitutional Congress and the Federalist papers, especially Federalist #42.
Fortunately, lately the USSC has seen fit to start throwing out laws passed under the auspices of the commerce clause. But they clearly don't go far enough as they still allow the federal government to regulate how much it costs to ship a product from state to state, and many other things which would have been anathema to the founders. In addition, they regulate anything that even remotely might pass in interstate commerce, clearly not what the founders had in mind when they included this as a power in the Constitution.
This is the problem with people reading things into the Constitution that is clearly not there. Two words that are very important in reading the Constitution, limited and enumerated. Especially enumerated. If it's not enumerated by a simple reading of the Constitution, it's not allowed. If you want it to be a power that the government has, then get an amendment passed and ratified. Otherwise, they can't do it.
But this is neither commerce nor interstate. No money or goods changed hands, and nothing involved in the suit ever left the man's property. What this did was to grant federal government to power to regulate virtually anything you own because you might sell it to someone in another state. Do you believe that this is what the plain language of the commerce clause means, and that it comforms to the original intent of the founders when they wrote it?
Anything that has made the internet actually useful by the majority of the users was done by private interprise.
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