Some idiot left a comment on a month-old post overnight about government health care:
> Because I get my health insurance through my employer and unless they change the carrier, I don’t have a vote on that.
Sure you do. You get to choose your employer, at least for now.
I note that you don’t get to choose your govt.
It’s called an election.
I guess that was supposed to be some kind of clever riposte, but it’s stupid. Or disingenuous.
One of these things is not like the other. If I want to change my employer, no one can stop me (or at least no one can stop me from leaving my current one). So far, at least. It is a matter between me and my employer, and my future employer. It is not a matter dependent on what millions of maleducated ignorant voters think.
I do not get to choose my government. If I did, I can assure you that I would have had a much different government for my entire life. In a democracy, you only get to choose your government if you make the same choice as the majority of other voters. Otherwise, you get their choice, not yours. In my entire life, I’ve never gotten my choice, or anything close to it. Which is why it’s best that, given it’s one-size-fits-all, government have as little power as possible, and that it be devolved down to the lowest level possible, as the Founders intended.
But the only choice that the Dems seem to want me to have is whether or not to have an abortion.
Rand, that was a good post, but I don’t think that governmental power “be devolved down to the lowest level possible, as the Founders intended” necessarily follows if you want to as much choice as possible. For example, say you inherit a piece of property, one that has been in your family for generations. You, actually being Rand Simberg and not some hypothetical person who inherited land, would want to have as many choices as possible regarding that land. A majority of your fellow American citizens might agree with you, but your hypothetical land happens to be located in a small town, which, unlike some small towns, but very much like other small towns, is full of small minded people who want to dictate what choices you have over your property. In the end, it might be one of the branches of the federal government which protects your rights from the small minded town council that wanted to limit them. I say this as someone who is currently fighting a gentle and friendly war with his town council to change some freedom-limiting laws — I keep saying “but that’s not contitutional”, and they keep saying ‘it’s our town’.” I’m not saying that this story shows that Federal is always better. I’m just saying it shows that small government isn’t always better.
I didn’t say that small is always better. I want a federal government that defends my rights (as in Bill of), not tramples on them.
Most anarchists and many libertarians contend that democracy is tyranny, often using Rands example.
I don’t think Rand should have used the phrase “small” government. “Limited” government is the is the better phrase.
Jardinero, I regret using the word “small”, which has too many meanings. Rand didn’t originally use the phrase “small government”. He said “lowest level possible”, which I interpret to mean “local government”.
Anyway, Rand, please note that there are many matters on which the Bill of Rights is silent and it is the will of the statewide or nationwide majority (plus “activist judges”) which is going to be what stands between your freedoms and a town council which wants to deprive you of them.
That’s because the Bill of Rights isn’t sufficiently explicit about property rights. The Founders must have felt it was sufficiently implicit. They were apparently wrong.
In my ideal world, the Federal government is limited by the constitution to one field: The protection of rights.
Nothing else allowed – no building stuff, no forcing states to agree on issues, no “helping”. Just the protection of rights.
My reasoning is that protection of rights seems to scale rather well. Everything else doesn’t.
(And further, in my mind the biggest atrocity committed by our current Federal government is to tax citizens that are not in the country. If we can’t vote with our feet as a last resort, we truly are slaves.)
I wonder if the Bill of Rights wasn’t more explicit about property rights because of ambivalence (or outright disgust) about the nature of some of the property those rights would have been extended to.
I also wonder what effect the property-ownership requirement for voting had on the nature of property rights in the Constitution, and if property rights should have been made more explicit when the requirement was dropped.
Rand and Eric J, that’s very interesting. Not being a libertarian (or maybe just not being very astute!), I hadn’t seen property rights as a specific hole in the bill of rights.
David, I suppose you view the US military as one way to protect rights, but the US military involves something you don’t want the federal government involved in: “building stuff”. Also, I really wonder if there aren’t a variety of federal agencies that you’d rather not do without and that can’t be replaced on the local level nearly as well.
But what really surprises me is your comment about taxing citizens not in the country. If you are out of the country and you need the US government, it will try to be there for you (look at the recent pirate incident).
On the other hand, you’re not a slave. Renounce your citizenship after you leave the US, and the government will stop taxing you. You’ll probably want to make arrangements for residency elsewhere, so you don’t have live in the international terminal at the airport.
Note, If the IRS thinks you’re just avoiding taxes, and you’re fairly rich, they’ll tax you once more anyway – not sure how that really works, but see
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/759866.html (for an answer in english)
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97245,00.html (for legal gobbetlygook)
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/world/18expat.html?pagewanted=print (for a story about how it works in the real world)
there are many matters on which the Bill of Rights is silent
I disagree. I think all are covered by the ninth amendment and the discussion that lead up to it. The problem is that too few are willing to defend our rights and too many are willing to trample them.
This country was founded on principle and majority rules happens NOT to be one of those principles. This is why we are NOT a democracy and were never intended to be.
Principles are supposed to overrule mobs. Today it is mob rule.
The federal budget now insures that it will be mob rule for generations. We have a fight today that is much more difficult than the one the founders fought. We are currently losing. The founders had principles while today we have mud.
“Today it is mob rule.”
Tell that to Emmit Till or James Cheney
Democracy can become a tyranny if the people have unfettered power over others. Of course, the U.S. isn’t a democracy, but the potential (and increasingly actual) tyranny of the majority is still a real problem. The Constitution was intended to be a grant of specific, limited powers, which protected our liberty by keeping government out of most aspects of our lives. That, of course, isn’t so true today.
The Bill of Rights, incidentally, isn’t a list of rights that we have or “most important” rights. It was intended to make sure that the very limited federal government did nothing to impinge on certain rights that people were particularly concerned with at the time. The fact that certain core rights–property, marriage, privacy, whatever–aren’t addressed directly or clearly doesn’t mean those rights don’t exist.
The fact that Bush and the GOP ran things a few years ago and Obama and the Democrats run things now doesn’t change the fact that wrong, illegal, and unconstitutional mean the same thing now as they did then.
I believe Eric J is partially right, in that property rights were less precisely defined in part because of the intense disagreement among the Founding generation about one form of “property” — slaves. Had the Constitution contained much stronger and explicit guarantees of individual property rights, it would have made it much harder for slavery to be contained and ultimately (as they hoped) die a death of neglect as the rest of the country expanded.
Indeed, in part this is why Dred Scott was so horrifying to the North: by explicitly recognizing an individual property right to slaves, not abridgeable by Congress nor state govermnet, it not only implied that neither Congress nor territories could prohibit the expansion of slavery (by bringing new slave states into the Union), it opened the door to the possibility that existing states in the North could not ban constitutionally ban slavery. Lincoln invoked just that fear in one of his famous debates with Douglas.
However, on the larger question, it’s worth noting that Madison and many of the Founders did not approve of the Bill of Rights in general. This is why they were amendments, not part of the original work. Madison, despite his academical tendencies, and disastrous actual leadership capacity, was a practical man. He felt that the only lasting defense of property rights was good government. If the government was good, property rights needed no defense. If the government was bad, no guarantee of them in a piece of old parchment was going to do much good.
Madison would probably be horrified at the degree to which we venerate the Constitution, use it as some crystal ball to divine the Right and True on any number of major and minor decisions (abortion, affirmative action, eminent domain, gun registration, the lengths of sentences for crimes, whether children should be bussed to achieve integration, et cetera). He meant to create a practical document outlning the principles on which good men would agree to govern. But he felt the real guarantee of good government was those good men, and only that. The country needed a steady supply of honest, well-intentioned, appropriately humble, decently educated, and steady men to govern her. With that stream, the Consititution was merely good advice from the older generation to the newer. Without that stream, he felt the Republic was doomed.
He had no prescription for generating that stream. I think he felt it just naturally arose, so long as conditions remained similiar to those he knew, and that they would naturally seek in a peaceable and reasonable way to govern, and the only important thing to do was to agree on a framework for choosing among them.
I doubt he spared a lot of thought for what would happen when technology and immigration changed the conditions of the country as stupendously as it has. Why would he? His generation solved their problems elegantly and wisely. He probably saw no reason why we could not solve ours similarly. Apparently, he was unaware that his was a rather special generation, and that by comparison we would act like a pack of gibbering apes flinging poo at each other.
“[P]ack of gibbering apes flinging poo at each other.” Our current political system in a nutshell.
ken anthony Says:
May 14th, 2009 at 10:54 am
there are many matters on which the Bill of Rights is silent
I disagree. I think all are covered by the ninth amendment and the discussion that lead up to it. The problem is that too few are willing to defend our rights and too many are willing to trample them.
I agree about the long neglected 9th Amendment, Ken. It’s very broad – overly broad to some people’s thinking – but that’s why our Constitution didn’t require a laundry list of rights as the abortive EU Constitution did. There’s also the long neglected 10th Amendment, too, that gives the powers not explictly granted to the federal government to the states. Both amendments are still part of the Constitution, neither overturned by subsequent amendments or court decisions. They’ve just been ignored.
In my entire life, I’ve never gotten my choice, or anything close to it. Which is why it’s best that, given it’s one-size-fits-all, government have as little power as possible
That may be why it’s best for Rand; it says nothing about why it’s best for anyone else. I’m guessing that there is someone out there who would like the government to have even less power than Rand. By the logic above, our government should be no more powerful than what is desired by the most government-averse of its citizens. Do we really want to make the well-being, happiness, and prosperity of 300 million Americans hostage to the preferences of that one (by definition extremely unusual) person?
our government should be no more powerful than what is desired by the most government-averse of its citizens.
No. I want it limited to what the constitution says it should be limited to.
Best description I’ve heard yet of this kind of issue: when I go into a store to buy a bottle of ketchup, the management of the store doesn’t stop everyone and ask them to vote on what brand of ketchup I get to buy.
I am not forced to use someone else’s choice of ketchup.
However, with the coercive power wielded by today’s government far beyond what the Framers intended, I am forced to use someone else’s choice of Nanny in Chief.
“Do we really want to make the well-being, happiness, and prosperity of 300 million Americans hostage to the preferences of that one (by definition extremely unusual) person?”
Do we really want to take seriously anything from someone who would write such a silly sentence?
By the logic above, our government should be no more powerful than what is desired by the most government-averse of its citizens
Not a bad starting point for discussions of government, that. Let’s put it in another context, Jim. Say you and 5 friends are going out to dinner. Would you take a vote, go where the majority said to go, taking the minority along and making them pay their share by force if necessary? Nope. An excellent short description of your decision-making process, as a group, would be our decision should be, first, that which is at least not intolerable to even one person.
You’d probably suggest the same thing about, say, the way a business should run. Should any employee be chained to his desk, unable to leave, if the majority thinks he shouldn’t? Ye gods no. What about your role as a consumer? If the majority in your neighborhood shop at Albertson’s instead of the local organic co-op, should they be able to force you go to, too? Heck no! Freedom!
Where is the only place where allowing the minority to have its freedom is intolerable? Why, in the army, as it happens. You can’t have a minority of the division retreating when the majority attacks. No, whatever the decision is, it’s necessary that all follow it in order for anyone to benefit. Dissension and indepedence of judgment are a disaster.
That’s the key to your vision of government. it’s not a republic, it’s not even a democraacy. It’s a military dictatorship, where all of us march in lockstep. The fact that the dictator may be chosen by election, from time to time, doesn’t change a thing. (Indeed, the Romans did choose their dictators, the original dictators, by election.)
Move to North Korea, Jim. It’s already just the way you’d like it. This is not the country for you, with its quaint fussy insistence on the rights of minorities to thwart the will of the majority.
I want it limited to what the constitution says it should be limited to.
Of course it already is. The constitution not only sets the rules, it specifies who gets to interpret those rules. If you think the government has unconstitutional powers, feel free to sue.
However, with the coercive power wielded by today’s government far beyond what the Framers intended, I am forced to use someone else’s choice of Nanny in Chief.
And if most Americans want a Nanny in Chief (or, say, Medicare), their opinions don’t matter?
Carl:
No thank you, I’d rather live here than anywhere else. But if I had to leave the U.S., at least there are quite a few countries where the standard of living is as good or better. All of them have governments with more power than ours. Can you point to any country with a less-powerful government that you’d want to live in?
And if most Americans want a Nanny in Chief (or, say, Medicare), their opinions don’t matter?
Jim, try to understand this. If 299,999,999 Americans want me not to vote in the next election, or prohibit me from standing on a public square and say the President is a jackass, or want Congress to pass a law saying that anyone with DNA matching mine can be searched without warrant at any time, the Consitution says that’s just too bad for them. You live in a republic, yes, but a constitutiional republic, and that Constitution in essence is a document specifying in some detail what the majority can and cannot do. There would be no need for a Constitution — in particular no need for a Bill of Rights — if the essential proposition was the majority gets what it wants. Why would we need to specify that? The majority always gets what it wants, in a republic. It’s the minority that needs the protection of law. To put it in grade-school terms, it’s the unpopular kids that need the teacher’s protection, not the popular kids.
Geez, didn’t you study government at all in school? Even my 11th grader understands this stuff.
I’d rather live here than anywhere else.
Too bad for the rest of us. One of the difficulties with a free society is the infamous free rider problem, those who take advantage of liberty, such as yourself, to subvert it for others. In an ideal world we’d deport you to some hell-hole where your views were in the minority — but which lacked the protections for the minority this place gives you. In principle, you might learn why Frank Herbert once defined democracy (he meant constitutional republic, but whatever, he was just a silly sf writer) as a system where you do not trust anyone with power over you. You might learn caution from the many, many ways in which a majority in the grips of mania, from real-estate bubbles to war fever, can pursue hideously destructive paths, and learn a healthy distrust of any system where the majority can too easily grasp levers exerting too much power.
Can you point to any country with a less-powerful government that you’d want to live in?
“Less powerful” is a straw man. I certainly didn’t specify it. Quite the contrary, I want a very powerful government, in the sense I want it to be able to stand up for me in the “community of nations,” which is roughly the same thing as saying the “community of thugs” in South Central LA. I want it able to beat the hell out of madmen in Tehran who might even think of taking me hostage, so said madmen don’t do it.
Furthermore, I’d like a government strong enough to enforce my individual rights against any local majority. If I’m a black man whom my cracker neighbors would prefer not to vote, I want a government that will shut them down. If I’m a widow with a piece of property the city council would like to condemn, so they can build a casino and whorehouse for off-duty SEIU members, I want a government that will tell them to take a hike. If some local thug wants to help himself to my property, I want a government that can put his worthless ass in the pokey for 10 years, or just chain him to the stocks and pass out free baskets of tomatoes. Et cetera.
But all of those functions are functions of defending my liberty. And I don’t mind if it defends the liberty of others. What it should be forbidden from doing is positively constructing any aspect of my life, personal or public. It should not be able to tell me my career, my choice of studies, my choice of mate or living situation, how many children I have, how I raise them, where I go to church or if I do, what I say in public, what businesses I start and how much I pay my employees (provided I do not lie to them, steal from them, or defraud them), nor from whom I buy my healthcare nor how much I pay for it, nor how much my doctor charges me.
So your question is properly phrased: Can you point o any country with a more constrained, liberty-defending government in which you’d like to live?
The answer is no. This nation is, as Lincoln observed, the last best hope of mankind. Until a new frontier opens, there is nowhere else to go.
It appears you’re interpreting the word “interpret” too broadly.
Which is, quite frankly, a common problem among those who support the “right” of takers to take that to which they are not entitled, simply because there are more of them than of non-takers.