Unalienable, Take Two

I previously posted about something Charles Johnson said that had me worrying that he thought individual rights are granted by government, rather than being unalienable. Unfortunately, a recent post of his about the Kagan hearings exacerbates that concern.

Let’s watch the subject of his post first, shall we, before looking at Johnson’s comments.

The video starts with a question by Sen. Grassley where he asks, “do you believe the 2nd Amendment codified a pre-existing right, or was it a right created by the constitution?” This is an excellent question to ask a nominee to the Supreme Court to see what they think about natural rights versus legal positivism. Does Kagan think we have unalienable natural rights, or do we have them at the discretion of the Constitution and the majority? Is the Declaration of Independence the founding document of the country that the Constitution relies on for moral support, or, being the law of the land, does the Constitution render the Declaration irrelevant?

What does Johnson have to say?

Sen. Grassley: God Wanted Us to Pack Heat

My goodness. Goodness gracious. Goodness me.

Watch as GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley hopelessly confuses the Declaration of Independence with the US Constitution, and declares that the right to bear arms comes directly from God.

In his haste to disparage the right for it’s history with the religious right, Charles really misses the mark with this one. The point of the line of questioning eludes him and he ends up looking like the one who is confused.

Senator Grassley never confuses the Declaration with the Constitution at all in the video. He may not quote the Declaration very well (it’s “unalienable rights” not “individual rights”), but there is no mix up. In fact, Grassley takes the time to distinguish between the two.

“I know the Declaration of Independence is not the law of the land, but it does express the philosophy of why we went to war [with the British] and why our country exists.”

Also, Grassely doesn’t say that the right to bear arms comes directly from God, nor is that the point of his questioning. Given the language of his first question, a direct quote from the Declaration is entirely appropriate to back it up, and it is clearly used to see what Kagan’s views on natural rights are. Does quoting from the deistic words of our Founding Fathers in the Declaration Independence, with its intentionally nebulous “Nature’s God / Creator,” make you a theocrat these days?

Grassley could have worded his question differently, as the natural right we have is to self-preservation in general, not to arms specifically. A better question would have been “do you believe we have a natural right to self-defense, or is it a legal right granted by the Constitution, and how does the 2nd Amendment relate?” The correct answer is yes, we do have a natural, pre-existing, and unalienable right to self-defense and the 2nd Amendment restricts our government from banning the common weapons we use to protect ourselves from others that wish to infringe upon our rights.

So what are Kagan’s views on natural rights? Tony Blankley has the answer at RealClearPolitics with a telling contrast of Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts on the matter.

Abraham Lincoln: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

Kagan: Senator Coburn, to be honest with you, I don’t have a view of what are natural rights, independent of the Constitution. And my job as a justice will be to enforce and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States.

Actually, to be picky, the enforcement of the Constitution and the laws is the job of the Executive Branch. Your job as a justice, Ms. Kagan, would be to determine if the laws of the land and the actions of its people are constitutional, based on your interpretation of the Constitution. And what better way to inform your interpretation of the Constitution than by studying it along side of the ideas and philosophy that made its possible and necessary?

Let’s go back to Blankley’s article for more on that philosophy (read the whole thing).

Apparently unbeknownst to Ms. Kagan [and to Mr. Johnson], from the very beginning, it was the inalienable rights of the people that made the people sovereign and thus permitted the people to form the Constitution and continue to guide its application.

The very reason for the American experiment was — and is — to establish the principle and the reality that no man or government may alienate a person’s life, liberty or pursuit of happiness… [These unalienable rights] are the animating purposes of all our laws — of the law. They are the soul of our Constitution. Without those rights, the body of law is a corpse — a soulless, purposeless, manipulable, disposable, dead, material thing. If Ms. Kagan does not know that, then she knows nothing of our law. [Emphasis added.]

… [All government powers] subordinate to the undergirding sovereignty of the people.

THIS!

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Candidate Nobody

George Will tells us that candidate nobody is not to be underestimated in this year’s election. The article is a profile of a candidate who may unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but the point to take from it is that this is the time for “candidate nobody.” Or as I might call it, “candidate zero.”

With the growth of the Tea Party and disarray of the established parties, along with the promotion and communication advantages of the internet, this is the time for grassroot candidates who understand that deficit spending, bailouts, and the erosion (or the jackhammering, bulldozing, and wrecking-balling from the last couple of years) of individual rights and representative government need to stop.

I guess I was on to something when I announced my campaign:

Much has been said about experience this election season. But aren’t you sick of experienced politicians? I am. I am tired of people who have been bought and sold, who owe favors for favors received, who have been sullied by the process of rising through the political ranks, and who have compromised their values while violating individual rights at every turn. I don’t want leaders with a lot of political experience. I’ll trust an honest person with an honest job before an “experienced politician” any day of the week.

So here I am, an absolutely inexperienced politician, starting his campaign and public life at zero; zero political experience, zero financial backing, zero recognition…This will be an internet experiment to see if an honest and intelligent person can come out of nowhere and compete with established politicians on the national stage.

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Happy Independence Day

Independence Day Game at Wrigley

Independence Day Game at Wrigley

It’s a little late to say “let’s get some runs.”

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Protesting Reality

In today’s TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski links to an article about the situation in Greece, and highlights the quote “you can’t mix Freedom and Free Lunch.” It’s a great line, no doubt, but the one that caught my attention was, “the spectacle of government workers, cranky retirees, militant unionists, and mad dog socialists locked arm in arm protesting reality is a sight we’d better get used to.”

Protesting reality. The futility of doing this is summed up in this vulgar yet pithy quote from Bad Santa. Ignoring and failing to understand the facts gets us nowhere. I take that back. It takes us in the wrong direction.

Wake up America! How many million unionists are we expected to carry on our public payrolls? How long can we keep government employees on defined-benefit pension plans while the rest of us scramble to fund our 401(k)s ? How many more people are we going to drop from the income tax rolls as we lean on a smaller and smaller slice of citizens to carry an ever greater percentage of the load, leaving the rest free to vote for tax increases? How large a swath of our population can we pretend to keep supplied with newly manufactured economic rights like free healthcare as Social Security and Medicare careen toward insolvency? How much more do we think we can borrow from the Chinese to fund day-to-day government operations? How long do we think we can afford to police the world?

What the world’s political leaders and those who elect them need most right now is a shocking example of the only possible outcome of trying to practice redistributive justice on a national or even global scale. Rescuing Greece is a mistake. What they deserve is a good hard dose of exactly what they are asking for – unvarnished socialism.

Throw Greece out of the European Union. Let them default on their debts. Teach buyers to beware before they invest in sovereign bonds. Dare Greece to print Drachmas by the wheelbarrow. Put the whole country on the public payroll then challenge them to demonstrate what a truly egalitarian society looks like. Maybe a dramatic spectacle of what a workers paradise looks like under the media’s glare will teach us what’s in store if we don’t change our ways.

Democracy is broken. You can’t mix Freedom and Free Lunch. One or the other has got to go.

Yes, let them default on their debts. Nobody is too big to fail. No bailouts. Ever. But let’s not ask them to give socialism another shot to prove it’s worth. It’s had enough goes. I wish a dose of “unvarnished socialism” would wake the world up, but if the current example of Cuba and past example of Soviet Russia, among many other examples, don’t do the trick, I doubt another failed collectivist experiment in Greece will.

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I’m Not Shocked

TechCrunch has been mistakenly cheerleading the FCC lately. Earlier this month they said that FCC regulation of the internet would be “a huge win for consumers.” This article makes the usual error (as with health care, or bailouts) of asking for a government answer to a problem without realizing that the cause of the problem is government manipulation in the first place. The last line of that article blames the lack of competition on the monopolies held by the ISPs in many areas of the country. Of course, in a truly free market, there is no such thing as a monopoly. The reason these ISPs, like Verizon and AT&T, are the only players in certain markets is that these monopolies are government created. There is too much regulation for starting a telecom business and laying new fiber. These ISPs are protected from competition because regulations keep competitors out.

And today, they are applauding more government interference because the FCC says they want to tackle bill shock.

The FCC is taking a stand against absurd phone bills. The regulatory agency is requesting public comment on a new initiative that will force wireless carriers to notify consumers about high charges, like unanticipated roaming or data fees.

“We are hearing from consumers about unpleasant surprises on their bills,” Joel Gurin, FCC Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said in a press release today. “This is an avoidable problem. Avoiding bill shock is good for consumers and ultimately good business for wireless carriers as well.”

If you go over your minutes, or are charged for texting too much, you have a couple of obvious options; use the services less, or upgrade to a better plan. Unfortunately, many people use a third option of complaining to the government and asking to be rewarded for their mistakes.

I guess I look at my phone bill a little differently. The “bill shock” I see is the 25% increase in cost due to “municipal and state telecommunications taxes.” And those costs will only increase with more government regulators to pay. It’s similar to the “paycheck shock” I feel when I see federal, FICA, Medicare, and state deductions.

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No Place for Racism

In the video below, Jenny Beth Martin does a nice job explaining the core values of the Tea Party movement, while defending it against the media’s default smear of racism. The most egregious attempt at this smear in the video is when the host asks, because nearly 80% Tea Party supporters are Caucasian, ”what would you say to minorities who say, ‘is there really a place for me as part of the Tea Party movement?’”

Well here’s a news flash for the host; nearly 80% of the US population is White. Yes, her charge is this absurd. She is essentially calling the Tea Party a racist movement because it has the same demographic breakdown as the rest of the country! Is she prepared to ask minorities if they feel there is really a place for them in America (I hesitate to ask that question because I have a hunch how she and her comrades on the Left would answer)? It’s more clear everyday that the Left is unable to argue against the ideas of this movement, and is resorting to tactics like this, twisting numbers and putting words in others’ mouths, even when the facts don’t agree with what they want to believe.

If the numbers mentioned by the host are true, then they are a ringing endorsement of the Tea Parties and they show that the opposite of the media’s smear is true; that the Tea Party movement is a place for people of all backgrounds. It’s good to hear Martin, as one of it’s leaders, say there is no place for racism in the movement and that people that hold and espouse those beliefs are asked to leave.

As Martin said, the core values of the movement are Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Markets. I agree with these values completely, but would add that they stem from the one core value and “founding principle” of Individual Rights. I think that most tea party supporters have at least an implicit understanding of this, that they believe ”the smallest minority on earth is the individual [and that] those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” This is why the movement has no place for racism.

Information from census.gov

White persons, percent, 2008 (a) 79.8%
Black persons, percent, 2008 (a) 12.8%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2008 (a) 1.0%
Asian persons, percent, 2008 (a) 4.5%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2008 (a) 0.2%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2008 1.7%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2008 (b) 15.4%
White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2008 65.6%
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Unalienable

I’m not sure if Charles Johnson thinks that the rights of American’s are granted by government, or if the false dichotomy in his sentence is supposed to be attributed only to the way “people like” Rep. Peter King sees things. Either way, it’s worth touching on here.

People like Rep. King are usually the same ones who claim that the rights of Americans are granted by God, not by the government.

Individual Rights are not granted by anyone as they are no one’s to grant in the first place. They are a part of us, automatically and intrinsically, by our nature of being individual reasoning beings. They cannot be granted anymore than they can be changed or taken away. This is what unalienable means.

A government’s proper function is to protect the rights of individuals, ensuring that these rights are not infringed upon by others, not to decide who should be granted them at the expense of another. But I guess a government needs to understand the unalienable nature of rights before it can defend them.

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Tax Preparation and the Broken Window Fallacy

The Broken Window Fallacy teaches us the important economic lesson that it is necessary to “take account of that which is not seen,” that when we see tax dollars being spent on a government project, we mustn’t forget all of the other ways that money could have been used if it wasn’t appropriated from it’s rightful owners. On John Stossel’s program this week, there was an astonishing example of this.

“Those of us who pay others to do our taxes spend more on that than the Fortune 500′s five biggest employers pay all their workers. In other words, what we spend on tax paperwork is greater than the pay of every worker at Wal-Mart, United Parcel Service, and McDonald’s, and IBM, and Citigroup – all those places combined!”

This means that there is an enormous void in our economy. Imagine all of the productive work that these companies do, all of the products they sell and create, and all of the families who rely on the jobs they provide. That is what is missing from our economy because it is wasted on tax preparation.

And the above example only takes into account the money spent, not the time spent. I shudder to think of what the true waste is if the IRS is right and “the average time required to complete and file the commonly used Form 1040 this year [2009] should be 26.4 hours.”

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Unhappy Birthday to Me

Well, yesterday’s news from the House wasn’t the birthday present I had hoped for. I don’t feel like saying much more than I haven’t already said before. One word will suffice; REPEAL.

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Hiding Spending does not Reduce Spending

Since this is the big weekend for the health care plan, let’s take a look at Paul Ryan taking the president to task for the “gimmicks, smoke and mirrors,” and shady accounting used to trick us into thinking this massive new government entitlement will save us money, let alone be budget neutral. Pay attention to the dishonest back-loading scheme that only counts 6 years of spending against 10 years of taxes as a way to say the first 10 years will save money.

We have more evidence than we need to know government initiatives grow well beyond their estimated cost, size, and scope (Social Security, Medicare, Fanny and Freddie, and oh does the list go on). To think this will be any different is delusional.

Ryan is correct in saying at the end that this all comes down to an ideological differerence; “we don’t think government should be in control of this, we think people should be in control.” I agree, though I would replace “people” with “individuals.”

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