Posted on 06/21/2015 10:44:20 AM PDT by Johnny Navarone
Edited on 06/21/2015 12:27:13 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tensions are building inside and outside the white marble facade of the U.S. Supreme Court building as the nine justices prepare to issue major rulings on gay marriage and President Barack Obama's healthcare law by the end of the month.
(Excerpt) Read more at ca.news.yahoo.com ...
What court or office, other than the Supreme Court, could revise or overturn the Supreme Court's authority to interpret the Constitution?
That may apply in yesterday world of reason and sanity, but not anymore...
Don't have the correct sexual organ that fits your "identity"...no problem...medical science has the solution...
I didn't say that free markets don't work. I said that Constitutions don't work.
Can you show me a Constitutional Republic which has successfully prevented its Constitution from become a dead letter for at least 100 years? Just one? Even if you can, that would be an abysmal success rate.
"If an agency is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, then it is also judge in all conflicts involving itself. Consequently, instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision making will also cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of the state, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding." ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Can you show me a Constitutional Republic which has successfully prevented its Constitution from become a dead letter for at least 100 years? Just one? Even if you can, that would be an abysmal success rate.
"If an agency is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, then it is also judge in all conflicts involving itself. Consequently, instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision making will also cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of the state, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding." ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe
I meant to add the application of the word “consummate” in marriage is relevant only to a religious marriage, not a civil one...
If parents where making sure that their children were being taught the Constitution, then grade school children would probably be able to tell us the following about the constitutionality of Obamacare and so-called gay “marriage.”
Not only have the states never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate, tax and spend for intrastate healthcare purposes, but the Founding States made the 10th Amendment to clarify that the Constitution’s silence about marriage means that the states are free to make 10th Amendment-protected laws which prohibit constitutionally unprotected gay “marriage.”
Afraid you are right. If nothing else, Robert's ego might come into play, not wanting to imply he was wrong in propping it up the first time by ruling against it now.
Tomorrow we have the meeting in Greece that could “whack” the euro. Toss in a couple of controversial rulings from the SCOTUS, and we could see a “perfect storm” in the stock market.
Gonna have to keep Bloomberg biz on in the background
Without the people using it effectively, a Constitution is "just a piece of paper." Tools don't use themselves.
That's why the failure of the people to effectively use the Constitution is metaphorically equivalent to the failure of the Constitution. Saying that "Constitutions don't work" is just a metaphor for the assertion that the subjects of a state can't/won't use Constitutions to protect their liberty. They never have, and never will. Not for any historically significant length of time.
“The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, ‘Limit yourself’; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.” ~ Rothbard
“I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.” ~ James Madison
"If men are good, you don’t need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don’t dare have one." ~ Robert LeFevre
The Left doesn’t believe in any gods except the ones in black dresses and even then they only accept them as the ultimate authority when they reward the Left with some decision.
Yeah ya did.
the same reason that letting a private business regulate/police itself doesn't work.
You can't just "un-say" those words.
Question: Suppose there was a man and a woman who wished to be married in a religious ceremony, and one of them (for whatever reason) was physically incapable of performing the sexual act. Are you saying that their inability to consummate their marriage would result in their marriage being invalid?
Not trying to be snarky, I've just never heard of such a thing.
He supposed if an homosexual man or women couple were married and did not consummate their marriage after saying "I do", since they can't physically have sexual intercourse, there would be no legal standing to each other estate because they never consummated their marriage...
In the strictest legal sense that is true for a religious marriage but not necessary for a civil one...
Personally, I don't think "we never did the horizontal lambada" or "I'm Gay" isn't going to fly as a legal reason not to have a shared estate if one dies before the actual act...civilly or religiously
I keep asking a similar question about the military, but people are still signing up.
You asked:
The Paradox Of Self-Government
The state hypothesis argues that granting the state certain powers and authorities that no other entity has is the optimal solution to the problem of peaceful human interaction, cooperation and collaboration. Of course, there are many variations on the theme: Absolute monarchs, direct democracies, and modernly Constitutional republics, to name just the most common.
The principle argument for the state hypothesis is that human beings tend to mistreat each other, and so the state is necessary in order to protect the rights of all from the deprivations and abuses of the few.
But who will guard the guards themselves? Humans do not cease to have a tendency to mistreat others simply because they become employees (or leaders) of the state. That is the central paradox of establishing a state with a monopoly on the authority to operate as a government.
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." ~ James Madison
The United States was founded by those who believed that a Constitutional republic might be the optimal form of a state, and that a Constitutional republic with limited powers might be a good solution to the problem of how to keep the state from becoming the very thing that it is intended to prevent from coming into existence, namely, a tyrannical violator of individual rights that no one has sufficient power to oppose:
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." -Thomas Jefferson
But the state hypothesis has a fundamental flaw that categorically prevents it from being true: It's based on multiple logical contradictions.
The state, by definition, claims it has two authorities that no other entity has:
Firstly, it asserts the authority to be the monopoly provider of certain services: Law making, law enforcement, judicial services and the use of coercive force. As the monopoly provider, it charges for those services whatever it wants. And not only does it give its "customers" no choice regarding the price they must pay, it doesn't even let them choose which of its services they must buy. They must buy all of them.
Secondly, it asserts the authority to make laws that no non-state entity has any right to make or enforce--such as the right to steal (e.g., impose taxes) and the right to enslave [see below.]
And both of those claims are the principal justifications proffered by those who believe in the state hypothesis. Those claims of authority are what both define and (allegedly) justify the existence of the state.
But the state cannot possibly have any authority that those who create it do not have themselves. There is no other source for such authority.
Valid rights can only be those that all concede that everyone else may enforce against all others. So to be valid, one person's claim that he has the right to enslave someone else by force means he must peacefully acquiesce to that same claim by others. If he does not, then his claim does not assert a valid right.
In contrast, my claim that I have the right to life requires that I fully and reciprocally accept and respect everyone else's claim that they have the right to life. If I'm willing to do that, then my claim of the right to life is valid.
That's what equal rights mean: They are symmetrically and reciprocally possessed by everyone without logical contradiction.
In order to avoid logical contradiction, individuals can have no valid right to make and enforce laws whose restrictions or compulsions violate the rights of others. Nor can individuals have any valid right to violently and forcibly prevent others from competing with them in providing services--since if one person has the right to provide those services, so must everyone else.
We are all sovereign individuals. We are all equal in that we all have equal authority and jurisdiction.
You are not free if someone has more authority over you than you have over them. Liberty requires the prohibition of any "subordination or subjection" of one person to another. Since any interference by A with B's liberty constitutes a subordination or subjection of B to A, the right to liberty follows straightforwardly from the fact we all must have equality of power and jurisdiction.
That's why the claims of the state that it has the rightful authority to make you serve it, to make you use only it as the monopoly provider of governmental services, and that you must pay for those services a price you have not agreed to pay--even for those services you neither need nor want--are not valid.
“If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized.If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.
That your whole claim of a right to any man's money for the support of your government, without his consent, is the merest farce and fraud, is proved by the fact that you have no such evidence of your right to take it, as would be required of you, by one of your own courts, to prove a debt of five dollars, that might be honestly due you. “ ~ Lysander Spooner
The state can have no rightful authority you don't have equally, symmetrically and reciprocally. If the state has the rightful authority to force you to buy its services at a price it sets, you must have the same rightful authority to reciprocate. If the state does not peacefully concede that point by paying the tax bill you send it, then its claim to have the authority to do the same to you is invalid--because it creates a logical contradiction.
"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law', because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." and "No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him." ~ Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, 1816
The all-powerful state is a parasite masquerading as its own cure.
It is a logical contradiction to argue that something that does X should exist in order to prevent X from happening. But that is precisely what the state hypothesis does: It argues that, in order to prevent the powerful from establishing a tyrannical rule that violates the rights of the weak and the poor, it is necessary to establish a state with the sole power to violate anyone's and everyone's rights.
Systems based on logical contradictions cannot work, in the sense that they cannot reliably work as intended or designed. There are ways around those logical contradictions. But creating and empowering a state is not one of them.
So what is the alternative?
Firstly, there is no such thing as a utopia. There is no system of societal organization that will give everyone everything they want. Nor is there any system that will guarantee that no one's rights are violated. So anarchy is no guarantee that some people won’t kill, injure, kidnap, defraud, or steal from others. But having a state--a monopoly on making law, enforcing law, and judging law--is a guarantee that some will.
We know that an economy that is completely owned and operated by the state does not work as well as one where there is some sort of partial "free market." And we know why:
1) The state doesn't work as the overseer of all behavior because a monopoly "night watchman" is a single point of failure, and a single high-value target for corruption. And to have an entity that regulates itself is a conflict of interest.
It's not that it's wrong to have a third party act as a neutral arbitrator, watchdog, or guarantor of safety, quality and effectiveness. That's absolutely necessary. The issue is that the state has a monopoly on the regulation of commerce and all other activity--including its own. The problem is the conflict of interest involved in self regulation, and the lack of competition because the state permits no alternatives to itself.
The state makes the laws. It decides what the abstract semantics of the laws shall be--and can do that differently in different cases. And it decides how the abstract semantics of its laws shall apply in particular cases, which it can also do differently in different cases. And it is the final arbiter in all disputes--including ones where it is a party. The state finally decides whether it has followed its own rules.
"If an agency is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, then it is also judge in all conflicts involving itself. Consequently, instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision making will also cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of the state, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding." ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe
The state, by definition, cannot be apolitical. Because it is a monopoly, there are no competitive pressures to keep it neutral or honest. So it will use its monopoly over the law and its enforcement in ways to preserve and increase its power at the expense of those it governs. And those who control it will use its power to do the same for their faction. Power corrupts, and monopoly power corrupts overwhelmingly.
Who will guard the guards themselves? There is no transitive closure to that question.
Because a monopoly has no competitors, it leaves its "customers" no alternatives. Therefore, there aren't even any competitive pressures to help keep the state in line.
Nor is democratic voting any sort of replacement for the lack of competing alternative providers or the fact that it's a conflict of interest for the state to police itself. Voting cannot change the state itself nor directly change its accumulated policies, practices, precedents, laws, rules and regulations. Those things are essentially never put up for direct vote. And even if they were, direct "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on who's for dinner." That's why voters are rarely allowed to vote on policy directly, but are only usually allowed to vote for representatives.
But voting for representatives replaces one problem with others that are equally devastating. It's almost impossible to replace representatives en masse. Even replacing enough of them to shift the balance of power in the government from one faction to another only happens once every decade at most, and usually less often than that. And representatives always blame both their predecessors and the representatives of the factions who oppose their own for any and all problems and failures.
Yes, you can vote for whichever faction you believe in, but the result will almost always be one (or more) of the following: your candidate loses, your faction fails to gain or retain power, your faction lacks sufficient power to make the changes you wanted, your faction refuses to make the changes you wanted because it claims it would lose the next election if it made those changes, or it makes changes in the direction of what you wanted, but the actual changes fall short of what you really wanted because of the compromises that had to be made in order to make any changes at all. And even if your faction wins and makes exactly the changes you wanted, the state's bureaucracy will inevitably implement and enforce the new policies in ways that absolutely no one actually wanted, not even you.
The undeniable truth is that democratic elections for managerial control cannot make a single entity function as though it were many different, independent entities. Unlike a free market with independent competitors, a single entity cannot simultaneously provide what all factions want, nor make it possible to compare the price and quality of alternative service providers all of whom operate at the same time. Democratic voting can only provide choices between factions who can only offer a) theoretical promises of what might be if they had or kept power, or b) a continuation of the status quo that satisfies no one, because the status quo cannot be anything other than a succession of imperfect compromises between the various factions and the bureaucracy that makes policy decisions real.
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." ~ Lysander Spooner
2) Free markets dynamically and organically solve the "economic calculation problem" far better than any politburo, central planning agency, dictator or philosopher-king.
Monopolies are not optimal economically, and self regulation is a conflict of interest. There is no reason to believe that those two well-established facts do not apply to making laws, enforcing laws, providing judicial services or using coercive force.
Relying on free markets to provide all services, even those traditionally provided by the sate, does not mean there would be no government or regulation of the market at all. And no, providers of products and services would not be expected to be their own regulators. That won't work for the same reasons it doesn't work in the case of the state.
The problem with the state--which is organized power that claims and violently enforces a monopoly on the use of coercive force and the provision of governmental services--is the same problem that arises with any hierarchically-organized power structure. And it's the same problem that arises when any person or group has a monopoly. And it's the same problem that arises when any human attains power. We have met the enemy, and he is us--human beings.
You cannot solve the problem of wrongful use of power by creating hierarchical power structures that concentrate power at the top of the hierarchy. Even if one initially installs people of perfect integrity in such positions of power, they will not remain in office forever. Eventually, those who would seek to corrupt the system to their advantage will succeed. And they are likely to be the rich and powerful:
"When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating." -- Frederic Bastiat
In contrast to the state, the market is just shorthand for the sum of all consensual transactions between individuals. It is not some other entity. It is just humans acting freely.
Yes, markets can also fail to give everyone everything they want, to prevent injustice and to protect the weak and powerless. But there is no evidence that they fail either more frequently or more severely than states do. And when markets do fail, they adaptively fix the problems--and do so more quickly and effectively than politicized monopoly governments do, precisely because they are apolitical and provide everyone the simultaneous choice of multiple vendors for services.
But the fact is, in spite of claims to the contrary, the free market has not failed in any significant way:
We don’t live in a society where the free market has the primary authority or responsibility for protecting rights, property or otherwise. We live in a society where the primary authority and responsibility for that has been socialized and politicized.
It is the state and its public (not private or free-market) system of law making, law enforcement and judicial services that our society gives the authority and responsibility to protect lives, health and property. So any failure to do that function effectively and/or satisfactorily cannot possibly be rightly placed anywhere else than on the state, and not on the free market. The state prohibits the existence of a free market in law and/or judicial services. It claims to be the monopoly provider of such services, and enforces that claim with overwhelming force.
The state makes the rules that define what activities will be allowed and which will be prohibited, makes the rules that determine whether, when and to what extent commercial ventures that misbehave will or will not be forced to pay for damages, and makes the rules that may or may not prohibit fraudulent or harmful activities. The state enforces those rules, judges whether its rules have or have not been followed, and grants immunity from suit or prosecution as it sees fit.
It is the state that creates corporations, that gives the shareholders of those corporations immunity from the actions of the corporations whose shares they own and immunity from any tax liability for the undistributed profits of those corporations.
It is the state whose laws and regulations create the barriers to entry that make it extremely difficult for small firms to effectively compete against the large corporations, with the result that market after market is dominated by large corporations with few competitors, and no small ones.
And those who believe in the state hypothesis are not all that happy with the results of having a state with a monopoly on regulating and policing commerce–but inexplicably blame the free market for this failure of the state.
And the critics of the free market, amazingly, even fully understand the reason that states fail so badly! It’s because they are the monopoly providers of governmental services. These critics abhor both monopolies and huge organizations, rightfully preferring small, local organizations and denial of monopoly power. And they can explain their reasons for that attitude quite cogently. But for some inexplicable reason, they only have that attitude with respect to private businesses in general, and large corporations in particular. Why they don’t apply the same logic to the largest, most powerful corporations–namely, states with a monopoly on the provision of governmental services in general, and law and justice services in particular–is one of the great, confounding mysteries of the modern age.
"If men are good, you don’t need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don’t dare have one." ~ Robert LeFevre
Or at least, having a government with the monopoly on making law, enforcing law, providing judicial services and using coercive force would be exceedingly stupid. That puts all risk of failure in one place, guarantees that tyranny will evolve eventually, and ensures that there will be no easy escape when it does.
“The man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, ‘Limit yourself’; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian.” ~ Rothbard
“I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure.” ~ James Madison
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." ~ Benjamin Franklin
Or so people think. Which is why Constitutional Republics always fail. The truth is that the worse people are, the more tyrannical will be the state, if there is one. The state reflects the people who are its livestock, not the other way around.
"The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently." ~ Gustav Landauer
"Anarchy is the order of the day among hunter-gatherers. Indeed, critics will ask why a small face-to-face group needs a government anyway. [...] If this is so we can go further and say that since the egalitarian hunting-gathering society is the oldest type of human society and prevailed for the longest period of time – over thousands of decades – then anarchy must be the oldest and one of the most enduring kinds of polity. Ten thousand years ago everyone was an anarchist." ~ Harold Barclay, American anthropologist (Barclay, Harold (1996). People Without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy. Kahn & Averill. ISBN 1-871082-16-1)
No. I emphatically did not.
You can't just "un-say" those words.
Not my concern, since I said no such thing. You, on the other hand, do have that concern. At this point, your only honorable option is a retraction and an apology.
Nevertheless, you didn't answer my question, which is, once again, exactly, precisely what, pray tell, is your superior solution to a constitution based on God-given (not government granted) natural rights?
"letting a private business regulate/police itself doesn't work"
Well, since I copy/pasted those non-italicized, non-quoted words from your post #8, with your name on it...
I am so sorry some miserable ignorant bastard hacked into your account and posted those words in your name.
If they vote in support of gay marriage, maybe Roberts will come out of the closet.
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