constitutional issues

Is it Time to Alter or to Abolish?

Mark Noonan50 Comments

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

So says our sublime Declaration. It is, presumably, the founding principle of an American. The trouble is, that for a very large portion of the population of the United States, it isn’t. And this portion may, indeed, constitute a majority. Perhaps even a large majority. It might be time to find out.

There is a very strong division in this nation and in spite of calls for unity and peace, what we have seen this past couple weeks is that our opponents do not think it good enough that we accept the results of the 2020 election. No; to them, that is not near enough. We need to be de-programmed; harassed; hounded out of public life. They don’t merely want power – they want power over us. We are unacceptable as we are. Until we are changed into them, they believe there cannot be peace.

On our side, it is very different. At least, for now. For the moment, you and I are perfectly content that our opponents live as they want to live. In their communities, we don’t care what they do. In fact, we find it even a little interesting and entertaining. We visit New York City or San Francisco and we find it all amusing. We are very happy to return home, of course, because we would never want to actually live like that…but going out to see how other people live and organize their lives is fun. Not so our opponents: on those rare occasions when they do visit our areas, they are horrified and simply more determined to change us. The trouble is that as they become ever more insistent that we change to suit them, I perceive a growing willingness on our side to pay them back in their own coin. This is not an optimal development. It is the stuff with which civil wars are made. Remember, our civil war (and another good example is the Spanish civil war) came about because each side became fearful that the other side was going to force it to conform.

Fortunately, we do have a way out. Built into our Constitution is the means to do so: we can call a Constitutional Convention and recraft our means of government.

Now, this is fraught with perils of it’s own. Things like this can spin out of control. But they can also hammer out compromises between very disparate interests. And, if it does prove impossible to hammer out a new Constitution which the overwhelming majority of Americans can subscribe to via ratification, then I think it would be clear that separation is best for everyone.

Do understand that if we call a Convention, we on our side might find that large majorities are in favor of calling health care a right – and a host of other things which we don’t think are. But even if we did find that, then at least we’d find where we are in the system. If the American people, in Congress Assembled, crafted a governing instrument which we truly found abhorrent, then our choices would be to knuckle under, or leave. But I don’t think it would be like that. I think we’d either be able to build something acceptable to 70%+, or we would find the task impossible and it would then become an effort at separating the nation peacefully.

I’m sure we can all find scores of things we’d like to have in such a new document – and if the spirit of compromise is really there (if, that is, we really are all Americans and thus willing to give to get), then we might find the ability to do things like really securing freedom of conscience in return for our concession on health care being defined as a right. We might find ourselves in a very different sort of America than we imagined – it might have many elements that we consider outright Socialist. But if it also has elements which the Socialists consider reactionary…that would mean that we met in good will and crafted a document we can all live with.

What we can’t do, in my view, is continue to drag on with the Constitution of 1787. It is amazing that it has lasted as long as it did, but it is clearly unsuited to current pressures. It is, in many aspects, a dead letter. And perhaps rightly so: it was written by people who lived centuries ago and times have changed and, just perhaps, if we all have a hand in crafting a new governing document, we’ll all respect it and live in peace under it. We can certainly hope so. I fear that if we try to sustain that which has already died, we’ll just stagger from one power grab to another leading to civil war and Caesarism.

Back the Blue?

Mark Noonan14 Comments

We’ve all done that – almost reflexively taking the side of the police when they get into a dispute about an action. And, truth be told, very often it turns out the cop either acted correctly or had extenuating circumstances. But, not always. We have come across those cases where the officer was clearly in the wrong – and to our credit, we didn’t try to defend the indefensible. We’re not, after all, #MeToo Liberals urging a vote for Joe “Fingers” Biden. But I also think that we got a little too far in defending the police.

Over the past few days, I think we’ve all seen police officers using ridiculous actions to enforce closures and social distancing. I think the most egregious example is a Texas SWAT team (a rather chubby SWAT team, now dubbed “Meal Team Six” on social media) shutting down a bar which had opened in defiance of Coronavirus orders. But that is just one of scores – and it is starting to break into the Conservative mind that these police officers are “just obeying orders”…but insane, anti-human and likely unconstitutional orders. And if they’ll do that now, when won’t they do it?

It has been a rule since 1945 that obedience to orders is not exculpatory. The Nazis tried to get themselves off the hook by claiming they were just following orders but the ruling has been – and it is correct – that no human being is obligated to obey obviously illegal orders. Our police don’t seem to have that institutional belief: they appear to be willing to obey any order from on high…and this is disturbing us on the Right because we always assumed that most law enforcement people are, well, part of us. That when faced with an order to arrest us for political dissent, they’d refuse. Now we know different – when faced with a choice between enforcing an unconstitutional order and risking their pension, they’ll enforce the unconstitutional order.

This is just writing large what we’ve seen out of the FBI for the past few years. Even President Trump still couches his criticism of the FBI in terms of “most of the agents are good people”…just a few bad apples, right? But if they are good agents, why haven’t they come forward to inform on the bad apples? Right – doing so risks their career. And this makes them not good…in fact, it makes them bad; as bad as the actual bad actors. After all, Eichmann merely scheduled the trains…it took tens of thousands of German railway employees to actually get the trains from point A to point B.

Readers here know I’ve long been in favor of major reforms of the police and the abolition of the FBI…but now I think there is an urgency which was previously lacking. Those charged with enforcing the laws of the United States are showing themselves to be enemies of freedom. That their corporate identity (and fat pensions) are their biggest concern…and if that means they have to throw innocent people in jail, so be it.

On the whole, “back the blue” still makes sense – the police do a job most of us can’t and they deal with the seamy underside of civilization. But if we are to back the blue, then the blue had better be worth backing. They had better, that is, be dedicated to truth and justice above all. And it is we, the people, who will have to make sure that those we have delegated to enforces laws to are worthy of our trust.

How Far Do We Let the Left Go?

Mark Noonan46 Comments

The District Attorney of San Francisco – huge Commie rat – has decided that public urination will no longer be a crime. One fine person made the correct suggestion: someone should go piss on the DA’s car. But once that excellent and patriotic action is completed, what then? Well, it got me thinking (I know, dangerous!) and then I recalled Article 4, section 4 of the United States Constitution:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…

A Republican form of government is not just a bunch of voting going on. No; not at all. A Republic is a thing of dogmas and rules – and it only works if all the rules are enforced to the best of everyone’s ability. And one of the rules of a Republic is that laws cannot be set aside – but that is just what the DA is doing. In my view, per the Constitution, Trump could give the DA 24 hours to reverse himself and, if he refuses, send in US Marshals to enforce laws against public urination. A bit extreme? Sure – but extreme times do call for extreme measures.

It is best to step back a bit and think about what we’re dealing with here and the first step in that is to ask just why anyone would do anything which would allow or encourage people to piss on the streets? The answer lies in the DA – Chesa Boudin. If that surname seems familiar, it is because it is: he’s the son of Kathy Boudin, the psychotic Commie murderer. Which means that Chesa is both the son and grandson of hard core Communists. When his ma got arrested shortly after his birth he ended up being raised by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. He worked as a translator for the Commie dictator of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. He’s a true believer, folks; he’s Communist to the core. And that means he believes – completely – that all of the social pathologies in society are the direct result of Capitalism…and that once Socialism is in place, all of these pathologies will disappear. No, seriously: this is what Commies believe. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

The reason why a Commie doesn’t want to enforce laws against public urination is not because he likes to smell piss on the streets: it is because he’s sure that the man pisses on the streets because the Capitalist system made him that way, and no real Commie is going to do anything to prop up the Capitalist system. What the DA is doing is essentially saying, “see, you Capitalist bastards! This is what you created!”; and he’ll then go on to propose Communism as the cure; though given he’s an American Commie and has learned from the experiences of his parents and grandparents, he’s not going to flat out say that…he’ll call it being Progressive and working against the criminalization of being homeless.

Any enforcement of any law regarding property or public decency or such is seen by a Communist as a mere propping up of the Capitalist system, because all such laws were created by Capitalists for the sole purpose of retaining power. They aren’t about public safety or justice or anything such thing. Capitalists are inherently incapable of doing anything good – all the laws are merely enforcement of Capitalist supremacy (though today’s Commies will more usually say they are about supporting White Supremacy – which is just a substitute phrase for the Class Enemy; you know, Capitalists). A true believer like Chesa Boudin simply will not enforce any laws – which means most of them – which he, as a Commie, considers to be laws enacted by Capitalists to suppress the people (whom he is the Vanguard for, being that he’s a conscious revolutionary Communist, dig?). At the end of the day, electing Chesa Boudin as DA was an act against the existence of a democratic Republic…there is a good chance that even most San Francisco voters didn’t realize this but it still remains that a person is in the DA’s office who is opposed to the whole idea of a Constitutional order (remember: all of that Constitutional order was merely created to protect the power and wealth of Capitalists/White Supremacists/Homophobes/Insert-Hated-Group-Here). He is, in short, opposed to a Republican form of government. And, so, must be stopped.

Right now a whole bunch of my fellow Conservatives are going to start going, “hold on there, sparky: what about federalism and local self rule? You call yourself a Distributist and that means you say you believe in Subsidiarity (thing should be done on the lowest level possible); you some kind of hypocrite?”. I don’t think so – no more than the Founders were. They placed in the Constitution very strong protections for States and individuals…but they also did include the above quoted bit, and also permitted the federal government to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. And do note the justifications for suspending the writ: in cases of invasion, insurrection or when the public safety may require it. The public isn’t very safe if those charged with enforcing the laws decide not to because their loyalty isn’t to the Republic, but to a Communist revolution which will overthrow the Republic.

The bottom line of Article 4, section 4 is that we are not allowed – no matter how much we might want to – to vote ourselves into tyranny. 99% of the people of California could vote to impose a Bolshevik Dictatorship, and that vote would be immediately null and void per the Constitution…and if the people of California decided to resist the restoration of freedom, then the writ of habeas corpus could be suspended and everyone in California trying to support the Bolshevik government could be arrested and held without trial.

What we’re seeing in the deeply Progressive areas of the United States is people voting for tyranny – voting for DA’s who won’t enforce laws; voting to excuse themselves from provisions of federal laws (the “sanctuary cities”. eg); allowing non-left voices to be physically attacked; threatening people with fines and tortuous legal action for merely dissenting. My question: how far do we let it go? My view is that we’ve let it go far enough, other’s may dispute this; but in the end, we’re either going to enforce our Constitution or we’re not…the Left is counting on us not enforcing it until they’ve gained enough power to simply do away with it. And make no mistake about it: that is what they want – an end to liberty, and end to property, and end to free thought. Their goal is a socialist future. That they believe this to be a good thing – meaning, that some of them sincerely think they are working for our benefit – is irrelevant. We know where this leads – how long will we let them advance? Where is our line in the sand?

We have to decide that, and decide it very soon. And if we want to have this be a peaceful push back, then our best recourse is to use the tools the Founders entrusted to us, including the tools designed to protect people from their own folly. The Founders knew full well that people – being at times perverse – would vote for very asinine things. They gave wide latitude for such idiocy – and, indeed, no sane person will lightly try to interfere with local self government. But, come on: we’ve got full blown Communists undermining the rule of law; we’ve got insane homeless people defecating and pissing on the streets; we’ve got masses of illegal immigrants being protected in violation of law; things are getting a bit out of hand…and they’ll get worse if we don’t start to take action.

Thinking About the Ruling Class vs Everyone

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Over in Britain, the Brexit vote in Parliament has been delayed – because it probably would have gone down to crushing defeat and forced PM May’s ouster. I have no sympathy – she negotiated a deal which essentially kept the EU in power over Britain…except that, now, Britain wouldn’t even have a say in the EU. This, to me, was a feature, not a bug: the idea being, I’m guessing, that eventually the British people could be convinced that they must rejoin the EU. The plain fact of the matter is that no “deal” needs to be negotiated. All the British government has to do is say, “we’re out” and they’d be done. But that would only have happened if anyone in the British Ruling Class gave a damn about the will of the British people.

Meanwhile, over in France, les Deplorables have been conducting some pretty impressive riots. Seems that the French people have also had it with their Ruling Class selling them down the river. We’ll see how this comes out – personally, I’m hoping it develops into a genuine revolution.

Naturally, the Ruling Class is saying that the Russians are behind the French protests.

Still seeing lots of people speaking in favor of Experts. Ross Douthat has an interesting thing to say on that:

…meritocrats are often educated to be bad leaders, and bad people, in a very specific way — a way of arrogant intelligence unmoored from historical experience, ambition untempered by self-sacrifice. The way of the “best and the brightest” at the dawn of the technocratic era and the “smartest guys in the room” decades later, the way of the arsonists of late-2000s Wall Street and the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley…

Do read the whole thing. Mostly because you won’t agree with all of it. The bottom line is a fundamental irresponsibility. That they really lack merit and are often wrong isn’t the biggest problem: the biggest problem is that they never have to pay a price. Sowell often points this out in his books: those who propose to do all sorts of odd things are never the people who have to suffer the consequences. I came across a sorta-Conservative guy on Twitter (I’m guess he’s at least modestly famous, but I had never heard of him before) and he was arguing that America must take charge of the world! Be strong! Get out there and fight…and then I looked at his picture and saw a fairly fit, young man but his bio didn’t seem to include anything about military service. I suggested “you, first” to him: that if he wants America to flex her muscles in the world, that he go out and be that muscle…and get back to us once he was deployed.

Mixed right in with that was a small debate with a much beloved (and extremely liberal) friend where he was sort of on the side of Experts. I rejoined that the more stupid a person is, the more vital it is that they be consulted on the major issues. Experts build atomic bombs: morons drink beer and eat chips. On the whole, the more beer-drinking and chip-eating we do, the better off we are.

Chesterton once opined that it was disturbing how few politicians are hanged. And there is more in that than the mere healthy desire to kill those in charge from time to time. The larger issue is that a price must be paid for our follies…and every now and again, it would be salubrious to have those who promoted the follies be first up the scaffold. FDR, George C. Marshall and Ernest King are honored in the United States these days…you can find out all sorts of details about them and stand in rapt admiration over their deeds…but, you’ll find out less about the guys who were buried after dying of dysentery in a squalid, Japanese POW camp, even though the people ultimately responsible for those deaths were, precisely, FDR, George C. Marshall and Ernest King. You know: they made horrible, stupid mistakes…and then got other people, less famous, to pay the blood price to repair their errors. It would be simple justice if, every now and again, the FDR’s, Marshall’s and King’s swung from lamp posts.

But getting that done is very difficult. The problem is that you need people who can have a say but who don’t want to say much. Once upon a time, the Catholic Church tried it – at the peak, they managed to have King Henry II of England flogged for murdering St. Thomas Becket. To tell you how that came out, long term, one only needs say that Henry VIII had St Thomas’ bones scattered. The trouble is that people who care deeply about politics are those who tend to rise in politics…and they’re never terribly interested in fixing things; nor can they be relied upon to hang themselves are regular intervals.

So, Revolution is the only way out of this mess. We here in the United States are fortunate in that we have built in mechanisms which allows us alter or to abolish our government without the necessity of engaging in bloody revolution. Unless, of course, we get a situation where the Ruling Class tries an end run around the Constitution by, say, removing a popularly elected President on bogus charges. We’ll see how that plays out.

But make no mistake about it – we are entering, globally, a revolutionary time. It is a complex battle which pits those who make and do against those who consider themselves smarter than those who make and do. It is your local plumber against the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, if you want it in a nutshell. The victory for our side comes when we successfully demonstrate that the Ruling Class is both corrupt and illegitimate – that is when they’ll be turned out of power.

Restoring the Executive/Legislative Balance

Mark Noonan7 Comments

A guy I follow on Twitter (@TheOneSoleShoe) has written a very good article about an easy way to fix the imbalance between Executive and Legislative power. Right now, as we’ve seen with President Pen and Phone, the Executive can pretty much use the regulatory power of the bureaucracy to decree new laws, even if they aren’t called such. This is entirely opposed to the concept of American government. If you don’t like it, you can go through a lengthy court process and you might just wind up having bureaucratic over-reach enshrined in a Supreme Court ruling (as ObamaCare was, twice). The fix goes like this:

…Rather than allow the Courts to have the final and only say on the scope, meaning and intent on legislation as manifested in administrative rulings and rule-making, why not alter the APA (Administrative Procedure Act) to give Congress the power to approve all proposed regulations on an up or down vote? Currently all that is required is a “notice and comment” period to satisfy statutory due process requirements. But the Agency still retains practically plenary power over enacting the regulation, enforcing it, and even interpreting it. c.f. Chevron USA, Inc. vs Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 US 837 (1984)…

…(Congress) can, right now, statutorily amend the APA to grant itself final approval over all proposed agency regulations, any changes in agency policy that amount to a change in regulation, or substantial reinterpretations of the law including administrative case law decisions. If Congress fails to approve the regulations, they would not go into effect. This would provide a major check on Executive power which already, in an era of divided government, enjoys tremendous power through use of the veto. It would realign the federal branches to their original framework and move us from an Executive-led nation to a Congress-led nation as originally intended.

Do read the whole article as it lays out just what the President is supposed to be doing – hint: he isn’t supposed to be using his discretion to decide whether an illegal immigrant can stay.

Getting back to Constitutional governance is crucial to the long-term health and prosperity of the United States. We can’t afford to further drift into Presidential rule until our President is more akin to a Roman Emperor than a George Washington. There is always a danger, as Republics age, that the people, weary of the political fight, will just turn power over to someone who will take charge and make the difficult decisions. That might have some success, of a sort, for a while, but the end of it is the death of the nation. Only the people, continually engaged in the political life of their nation, can ensure that the nation remains vigorous. This idea is a great way to start to restore Constitutional governance and I think we on the right should run with it.

I Tip My Hat to the New Constitution

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Been pondering this for a while – what would I have, if I could do a re-write of the Constitution, taking into consideration some of the gaps people have used since it was written to wreck it? Below the fold is what I’d propose – it is pretty much the same Constitution you’re familiar with, though the Bill of Rights is included in the body of the document.

But it is also changed a bit – term limits for federal office are built in. Specific definition of “natural born citizen” is provided. If we are to have welfare and Social Security, provision is made for it…and the federal government is effectively prohibited from using such programs to advance federal government power. Contentious social issues are taken out of the purview of the federal government.

I’m not saying this is how it all must be, but it is how I think it should be – or something very much like it, if we want to restore rule of law and liberty in the United States. Read it and tell me what you think.

Continue reading →

The Death of Free Speech (And How to Restore It)

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Mark Steyn takes note of an outrageous event in Germany – satirist writes an insulting poem about Turkey’s President, German government decides to prosecute the guy under an obscure law which prohibits insulting heads of State:

…A free society does not threaten a guy with years in gaol for writing a poem. If you don’t know that that’s wrong, you should just cut to the chase and appoint yourself mutasarrıfa of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman sanjak of Berlin.

What a disgraceful person (Merkel) is, the worst German chancellor since …well, I don’t want to go all Godwin’s this early in the piece. But a few years ago, when Maclean’s and I had our triple-jeopardy difficulties with the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission and the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal, the response of many of my fellow Canadians to the eventual outcome was along the lines of: “Well, I don’t know what Steyn was making such a fuss about. The process played itself out and he was acquitted. So the system worked.”

Some of these people were genuine innocents who’ve never been caught up in a time-consuming seven-figure legal battle before. But many others were making the argument cynically. They know that, if you can tie up a book or a magazine article in court, then there will be fewer books and magazine articles…

As Steyn says, “the process is the punishment”. Now, in the United States our Founders wrote the First Amendment and so it is vastly more difficult to erect speech-suppressing “human rights laws” as they have in the rest of the Western world…but even here in the United States people self-censor in order to just be sure they won’t be the target of a howling mob of Progressive Social Justice Warriors. Remember, one ill-advised Tweet and you can lose your job – but even if you prevail, who wants to put up with that? Better to just keep silent.

It is time to put a bit of teeth into the First Amendment. I suggest a Free Speech Restoration Act.

1. No employer shall in any way sanction an employee for any act of speech made outside of work time. Religious bodies may terminate an employee for acts of speech which deny any of the clearly expressed dogmas of the religious body.

2. Social media companies which allow the exposure of private phone numbers and addresses without a person’s consent may be held liable for civil damages.

3. Persons who spread false statements about private individuals may be held liable for civil damages. Social media companies must provide relevant information upon court order to identify any person who may have spread false statements about a private individual. Private individuals for the purposes of this law are persons who are not an officer of a corporation, an elected or appointed official of government, an employee of a government agency or the employee of any news media entity.

4. Congress shall appropriate a sum not less than $5 billion per year to provide free legal representation to any citizen who needs such representation in order to recover damages resulting from actions taken by employers, social media companies or persons who in any way sanction or cause sanctions to be applied to a citizen for acts of speech. Private individuals who are accused of spreading false information are also entitled to free legal representation.

That should do it. The most important thing is that you can’t lose your job over what you say outside your job. While at work, you do have to toe your employer’s line and if you don’t like it, you can find other employment…but once you clock out, you can say whatever you please and there is nothing your employer can do about it. This, in and of itself, would cure most of the self-censoring which goes on. The second important thing is to provide economic sinews for those who are victims of mob action for stating unpopular opinions…and the fact that such sinews exist, once a few examples are made, would greatly curb social justice mobs. And by excluding those who are in power from protection under this law, everyone is still free to go after the powerful with gusto.

We on the right have a vested interest in this. On the whole, we don’t engage in activity which seeks to suppress anyone’s speech. The left, of course, makes it their business to shut up everyone they disagree with. If we don’t swiftly find some means of ensuring our right to speak, then soon we won’t be able to speak, at all. And I think such a law could garner popular support – certainly the legal industry won’t be against it! But the basic concept of privacy and not lying about other people will be in line with general American ideas of what is right and just. All we have to do is find a candidate who would be willing to run with it.

Can America be Conservative?

Mark Noonan55 Comments

You wouldn’t think so, if you listen to the MSM all the live long day. As far as that goes, the MSM Narrative is that one or two aged Christians are all that stands between us and the Progressive Utopia of $15 an hour minimum wages and daily flights bringing in foreigners who will be able to vote from age 16 on. On the other hand, 84% of the American people back a ban on late-term abortions – including 69% of those who identify themselves as “pro-choice”. In other words, this increasingly Progressive America has some how or another managed to latch on to a key aspect of Conservatism – respect for the inalienable right to life enshrined in both our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. I fully expect a ban on late term abortions to happen before I die – and I expect that one day abortion will only be permitted when it really is crucial to save the life of the mother. The tide in America is set on pro-life. How did that happen?

Patience and charity played a huge roll. We can’t just change a person’s mind overnight. It takes a while – and you also can’t change a person’s mind if you’re being uncharitable to them…that is, condemning them, scorning them or otherwise indicating a distaste for them. While from time to time a rather zealous firebrand would come to the fore in the pro-life movement, it was pretty obvious that such people were (a) kinda shoved forward by an MSM which wanted people to think that pro-life people were like that and (b) they weren’t really representative of the pro-life movement.  It was hard to characterize the pro-life movement as bad when it was almost always people quietly praying and offering counsel and assistance to women in need. It was also rather crucial that being pro-life was, is and always will be to be in favor of not just something good, but something so obviously good that even the most inattentive can see the merit of your case.

Another case of us winning is on the gun control debate. When I was a kid, it was the “thing” as much as being pro-choice was. Of course everyone wanted strict regulation of guns. But by being patient and being charitable and being in favor of something that is obviously good – the right of people to defend themselves – the right to bear arms movement has triumphed. Oh, to be sure, our Progressives are still keen to take away the guns – but they are just as keen to provide federally funded abortion on demand, too…but they won’t get it and they dare not speak their desire openly, because they know the debate is over and they lost. Only in the very deepest blue areas of the country can Progressives proclaim their desire to have taxpayers pay for abortion and to confiscate all weapons. On the national stage, they have to be in favor of “choice” in abortion and “common sense regulation” of weapons.

So, as we can see, conservatism can win – we can conserve things; the right to life and the right to keep and bear arms. We can also conserve things like property rights, the family and the free exercise of religion, as well – but only if we go about it with patience and charity and carefully selecting our issues so that we are defending what is obviously good. Leaving aside family and the free exercise of religion, let’s use property rights as a means of illustrating how we’re doing it wrong.

At bottom property rights are the fundamentally conservative thing in economic policy. The right of a person to own what he or she makes or inherits is what we’re supposed to be about. But what we do is essentially winding up defending money – we do it by defending capitalism, as a thing, and the net result is that in the public mind, we’re defending those who have bags of money. And the really irritating thing about that is that while we’re in the public mind defending the wealth of robber barons we’re actually defending the wealth of Progressive billionaires who use their money to undermine the things we actually must defend – property rights, the family and the free exercise of religion.

We can’t win the fight to save property as long as in the public mind we’re defending billionaires and multi-national corporations. In point of fact, someone who has billions of dollars and a corporation as large as, say, General Electric is a negation of property. General Electric is a behemoth making a few people very rich. A billionaire doesn’t have property like, say, a farmer or small retailer has property. A billionaire has investments and interests and wants to defend them – and will use his wealth to ensure special dealing for his investments and interests (and large corporations do the same). A farmer just wants his farm to work. A retailer just wants his store to be profitable. Do you see the difference?

To win the fight to save property rights, we have to champion those who actually have property – not those who have buckets of money. In fact, we have to stand athwart those with buckets of money…because a key thing for us to conserve, if we are indeed conservatives, is the bedrock, “small r” republican concept that any great concentration of power is a danger to the Republic. Large amounts of money under control of one person or a few people are dangerous concentrations of power…just as much as any large government bureaucracy. We have to be seen as curbing the power of billionaires and large corporations – and our battle ground would be best defending small business operators and other small property owners against the regulations of government, often done at the command of large corporations and billionaires who are trying to use government power to protect themselves.

What I’m talking about is well illustrated by a proposal from Senators Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) to regulate soap – specifically, a requirement for soap makers to register with the FDA any time they change their ingredients. This will not adversely affect  large soap manufacturers – they only rarely change their ingredients and the economies of scale allow them to easily absorb the cost of new regulations. But small soap makers who can’t buy ten tons of their ingredients at a time and, at any rate, might just decide to, say, put a little more of Ingredient A into their soap can’t afford the freight. The big soap manufacturers are entirely behind this proposal – from Procter and Gamble to Revlon and everything in between…because they know full well it will drive a lot of small competitors out of the market, thus increasing their profit margins. We should be taking up the banner of the small operators against the big players…people will see, easily, that we are on the side of the good guys. And we’ll make our point that property rights are something worthy. A battle over this – and similar battles that come up – will allow us to cast ourselves as the defender of the little guy…and will show up Progressives like Feinstein and Collins for what they are: tools of the rich.

Other things that are obviously good can be defended, as well. The family, for instance. Don’t get wrapped up too much in some of the debates currently raging. They are trivial. But in Nevada the governor recently signed a law which empowers families to control the education of their children (it has to do with Education Savings Accounts which allow parents to easily save money to pay for private education). That is obviously good – in defending such a thing as that, we’re defending the ability of strong, responsible parents to be deeply involved in their children’s education, rather than having faceless and corruptible bureaucrats decreeing from on high what sort of education the kids will get. The difference here is not in attacking the public school system, which only allows Progressives to absurdly (but effectively) paint us as anti-education – we’re not attacking anything; we’re just empowering people to do for themselves, if they want. And in doing this we’re also defending family, as a thing. We’re not saying what is a family, at all – we’re just saying that families have rights and privileges that are worthy of defense. And that is a winning way to approach it – because no matter how crazy it gets out there, most families will remain what they have always been…mom and pop and the kids.  And in defending that, we’ll set the cultural stage for a revival of all the things which go along with strong, independent families. And into the bargain with our defense of strong, independent families is a death blow to Big Government: the more power we secure for families, the less power there necessarily will be for government to exercise. Think what happens to government mandates in education once, say, even 25% of the kids are being educated as their parents wish in institutions the government has no control over?

I guess if I had to nutshell it, the revival of a conservative America depends upon us finding the good things we want to defend, and then going out there an defending them without acrimony. People do wish to be fair  and if we’re defending what is fair, we’re going to win.

 

 

 

It’s the Arbitrariness, Stupid

Mark Noonan27 Comments

Arbitrary government operating by force, by terror, must destroy the best, the boldest dissenters in sheer self-defence; soon it finds itself destroying all who, on the one hand, do not actively assist it or, on the other, do not passively submit. – Edward Crankshaw

In other words, if you won’t have a government of laws and customs, then you simply must destroy the very best people you have…those who think in the boldest terms and seek to do the best. Arbitrary government cannot exist except when everyone is beaten down…and mindless, bureaucratic hacks are free to just grind away.

A strict – even Draconian – legal code is no problem, at all. If you know what the law is and if the law applies equally to all, then we all know where we stand. We can take care. We can take evasive action. We’re fine, even if rather inconvenienced. But when what the law is resides in the merest whim of those who enforce the laws, then no one really knows the law – no one knows what may be done, or what may bring punishment. People become fearful, dissent and innovation dry up…and the world is left to those who enjoy wielding arbitrary power (and make no mistake about it, some people do enjoy it…such people exist in all societies…and an arbitrary society just brings such people out of the woodwork in droves).

What we saw in Wisconsin is an example of arbitrary law – even if one wants to believe that Walker supporters were breaking the law, it was still an arbitrary enforcement…and done with such crude (disgusting, actually) force that everyone involved in right of center politics in Wisconsin became fearful. What our liberals – who are still mostly silent on the issue – don’t realize is that while they might think it good for such things to be done to conservatives, they will eventually be done to liberals, as well. People who like to arbitrarily enforce laws in a cruel manner never get tired of it – and when the enemies are all destroyed, they simply go after the friends, as well. You see, once you’ve got people empowered to do whatever they wish, they’ll do it – and, indeed, they have to, in a sense. If all the enemies are disposed of and it is now time to close up shop, that forces a bunch of people off the government gravy-train. They’ll invent new enemies as needed in order to justify their continues bureaucratic existence.

The lesson for all of us here – left and right – is strict rules strictly enforced. There is no half-way house. It is liberty or tyranny – no shading in between. We, as a people, must demand that our government officials scrupulously follow the rules…and if we find a gap in the rules, then we must fix it, and the government must follow the new rules, as well.