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Born: New London, Connecticut. My parents lived on base over the river in Groten. Hobbies: Browsing through bookstores, annoying heretics, and other intellectual amusements. Turn-ons: the doctrine of enumerated powers, history, and slow, seductive readings from The Law. Political heros: John Lilburne, Roger Williams, and Barry Goldwater. I think the term that best describes my political ideals is Constitutionalist. I'm one of those lonely people who care what the Constitution says. You'll notice that most public policy debates contain few, or no, discussions of what the Constitution says about the matter; my first consideration is usually the last. I believe that one of the requirements of a decent political system is that the people are free to do what is not forbidden but the government is forbidden to do what is not explicitly allowed. The Constitution is the place the powers of the government are listed. A.J.P. Taylor said, "Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked." This was also the case in America up to the time of the New Deal, and even more so before the Progressive movement. I want to restore that. I want the ordinary person to be left alone.
On the Libertarian Purity Test I scored 86, which makes me a medium-core libertarian, as opposed to a hard-core or soft-core one. The Ideology Selector gave me the following results(they included the links): # 1 Paleo-libertarian
# 2 Paleoconservative
# 3 Libertarian
# 4 Conservative
# 5 Left-libertarian
# 6 Neoconservative
# 7 Radical
# 8 Centrist
# 9 Third Way
# 10 Liberal
Here's what I got on the World's Smallest Political Quiz: 
According to the ACU rating quiz, I would get an 84% ACU rating, if I were a Congressman. The differences between my position and theirs are such that my vote would be the one a hard-core Constitutionalist would take. For example, their last question was whether or not you'd vote for a "bill allowing doctors to use controlled substances aggressively to alleviate pain, while barring them from using such drugs for the purpose of assisted suicide, thus overturning an Oregon law and preventing such laws from going into effect in other states." The correct vote is no, because that kind of bill is contrary to the Tenth Amendment. In this case, the liberal vote is the right one, for the wrong reasons. The A.J.Armitage reading list is on Amazon here.
"In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available to an average citizen in America right now." --Merle Haggard "I said, 'government is powerless to protect you,' not powerless to punish you." --Chief Wiggum, The Simpsons "One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence." --Charles Beard "It is better that ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer." --William Blackstone "Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe." --Edmund Burke "Law is extremely important in a libertarian society. You don't have many laws in a libertarian society, but those laws that you do have, you take very seriously." --Charles Murray
The United States Constitution The Federalist Papers But more importantly: 
The Blue Letter Bible The Bible Gateway Baptist Faith and Message The Spurgeon Archive RazorMouth |
