Self Ownership, Obamacare, and Abortion Rights

I was asked to publish the following article at the Savvy Street.  I agreed, but I wanted to revise it a bit.  The revised version is entitled The Ninth Amendment, Self-Ownership, and Abortion Rights.  

The Supreme Court has noted that abortion is not mentioned in the U. S. Constitution.  It is not.  Neither is it mentioned explicitly that every individual owns his or her own life.  Yet those rights acknowledged explicitly in the Constitution in the First and Second Amendments would seem to have a basis in an assumption that every individual owns his or her own life.  The right to self-ownership is surely one of the rights that was meant to be protected by the Ninth Amendment.  "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The Ninth Amendment is the most important amendment in the Bill of Rights philosophically because it recognizes that an individual's rights are not just a grant of government.  It recognizes, as did the Declaration of Independence, that all men are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness --"  It is the Ninth Amendment that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual in accordance with our philosophy of government spelled out in The Declaration of Independence.

Tragically, those who seek to expand the powers of government far beyond its enumerated powers in the Constitution, have never wanted to acknowledge the sovereignty of the individual.  His broad rights to self-ownership, to freedom of conscience, and to freedom of association have been subject to frequent violation by government too eager to control the lives of its citizens.  The central role of the Declaration of Independence and of the Ninth Amendment have both been denied.  This means that many government overreaches that should have been held unconstitutional on the basis of the Ninth Amendment have not been so thwarted.  The Ninth Amendment has been almost totally ignored.  This has led to many very contorted rulings by the federal courts trying to find some protection of rights that many Americans believe they have somewhere in the Constitution.  Justice Clarence Thomas has been notable for his lone attempts to point this problem out.

It has been noted by many that the Justice Alito argument that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution and therefore is not a right recognized by the Constitution, opens the door for making a similar argument against a right to same-sex marriages, the use of contraceptives, and interracial marriages.  Based on the Alito argument, each of these rights might be returned to the states for legislation limiting or protecting them.  These rights, as is the case with an abortion right, must have their proper basis in the right to self-ownership and freedom of association, both of which should be seen as protected by the Ninth Amendment.

The abortion rights decision by the Supreme Court has greatly angered many people, most of whom have consistently voted for the Democratic Party, though a sizeable fraction of Republicans also believe in abortion rights. The Democratic Party has been most vociferous in its denial of the right to self-ownership in all contexts but one and in its denial of the protections of the Ninth Amendment.  The existence of an abortion right must start with a woman's ownership of her own body. 

One of the best examples of the Democratic Party interfering with the right to self-ownership was the enactment of Obamacare.  Every Democrat Senator and 87% of the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for Obamacare.  They spent an incredible amount of political capital on this highly unpopular legislation.  While there were other reasons why many Democrats wanted this control over the maintenance of every American's mind and body, many wanted and understood that they were  really asserting a principle that no one owned their own mind and body exclusively.  They asserted that there was a collective ownership of every person's mind and body, which gave the collective, acting through the government, the right to dictate how every American would maintain his or her own mind and body.  The principle of collective ownership of our minds and bodies was explicitly noted in the first income tax return Obamacare applied to that designated the tax penalty line Shared Collective Responsibility.  I made the argument at the time that this assertion of collective ownership was the real issue with Obamacare, but almost no one supported me in this.

So now many women are furious that their abortion rights may be limited by the state they or other women live in.  They insist that they own their own bodies and should have the right to decide for themselves whether they will have an abortion or not.  Unfortunately, it does not dawn on them that if there is a right to self-ownership, then it applies far more broadly than just to abortion issues.  It surely also applies to the right that every individual, man or woman, has to determine how they will use and maintain their bodies.  It applied to Obamacare and many other examples of government limits on our board sovereign individual rights to self-ownership, including the ownership of our labor and our freedom of contract.  But no, selective assertion of a broad principle is all they care about.  Because of that failure to think in terms of principles, the Supreme Court now has no basis to assert any national abortion right.  The matter has been turned over to the states to decide.

I believe a woman has an abortion right, but its boundary is limited by that time when the development of a fetus makes it a human being protected from murder, or by when it is capable of independent life.  I am not asserting where that boundary is.  That is a thorny problem.  Perhaps that is a problem best left to the states and the more local beliefs of the people who live in those states.  However, wherever those decisions are made, if a woman has an abortion right, it is critically dependent upon her right to self-ownership.  Women who want to assert this right, ought to assert the right to self-ownership for every individual, man or woman, in all the contexts to which it applies.  If they do this, government will be far more limited than it is today and everyone but a few invidious special interests will benefit immensely.

Celebrating the Declaration of Independence Day

The Second Continental Congress agreed upon the 13 colonies of America becoming independent on 2 July 1776.  We should celebrate Independence Day on 2 July, as Benjamin Franklin thought we would.

There was a still more important event on the 4th of July, 1776.  The Declaration of Independence was signed by the members of the Second Continental Congress on 4 July.  This document stated the fundamental principles that would define the United States of  America.  These ideas were uniquely revolutionary in 1776.  Revolutions as uprisings were not too unusual, but the principles of the Declaration of Independence were entirely innovative as a basis for a new nation.

On this great day, this Declaration of Independence Day, we should read these inspiring principles and renew our commitment to them.  Our beloved Declaration of Independence says:

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.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

No nation had ever committed itself to the principle that all men were created equal before.  No government had ever stated that its purpose was to secure the rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Before this vision of the United States of America, nations had been dedicated to a few among a given tribal group or ethnic group.  In rare cases, a foreigner found to be particularly useful to the ruling oligarchy might be accepted into consideration for the nation's benefits.  But in the new United States, whose people were primarily English, Scots, Germans, French, Dutch, Swedes, Portuguese, Africans, and American Indians by ethnic origin at the time, all men were created equal, with unalienable rights, which it was the proper purpose of the government they were forming to secure for them.

Yes, the government long did not properly and morally follow through on the implementation of this principle for those ethnically African or American Indian, but its actions could always now be held up against the yardstick it had clearly stated in its foundational principles.  This universal recognition of human rights had never, ever been done by any nation before and is very rarely done even now by any nation.  The Declaration of Independence made the Civil War almost inevitable.  It also made the end of Jim Crow laws virtually inevitable. 

The Declaration of Independence puts a principled duty upon each of us to throw off the attempts of Government to abuse our individual rights.  It states that when Government fails to earn its legitimacy by ruling with the consent of the governed for the purpose of securing their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we have both the right and the duty to provide new guards for the security of our universal and individual rights.

Our Constitution is a great document also.  The Constitution puts the means in place to organize the powers of government in such form as to achieve the goals and principles given to us in our sacred Declaration of Independence.  Our Constitution cannot be properly understood if this is not realized.  The context for interpreting our Constitution is the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  The widespread failure to understand the severe constitutional limits on the power of the federal government is a consequence of a refusal to recognize the fundamental principles of The Declaration of Independence.

Today, the 4th of July, is the greatest of all American holidays.  It is Declaration of Independence Day!  Love this day, love our Declaration of Independence, and celebrate its inspiring principles of universal individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  If we do not do this, we will surely lose our ability to exercise our many and broad individual rights.  It is the exercise of these rights that makes life worth living.  Live free or die!

Should the Deplorables Respect the Swamp Creature Declared Winner of an Unconstitutional Election?

The Chief Executive of the federal government is the highest elected officeholder in the great and exceptional United States of America.  The USA is great and exceptional because it is the first government ever established with the aim of being a legitimate government.  Governments achieve legitimacy only to the extent that they protect the exercise of the many and broad rights of the individual.  These rights accrue to every individual, which was recognized in our Declaration of Independence, yet denied initially in our otherwise quite great Constitution.  We had to fight a horribly bloody Civil War to  recognize everyone's basic right of self-ownership.  Unfortunately, the ideology of socialism, whether Marxist or Fascist or a mix of both with other strains of socialism, continues to limit the self-ownership of the individual.  ObamaCare was a dramatic example of our government limiting self-ownership, with its claims of shared healthcare responsibility and its limits on what health insurance we were allowed to purchase for the maintenance of our own life and health.  Most recently, we have been reminded that the primary socialist party in the USA does not honor the right of each and every citizen to have one and only one vote in a federal election undiluted by illegitimate votes.

Respect is absolutely due a President who uses his best effort to cause the federal government to pursue policies that protect the exercise of the many and broad rights of every individual.  A President worthy of respect would battle foreign powers bent on using force against Americans, domestic gangs and individuals who initiate the use of force to take what they want from others, and those presumptuous government officials who believe it is their right to use the monopoly of force held by government to hurt some of the people or many of the people.  Any society of significant size harbors evil people who  use force to make other people do their will.  Some do so claiming to do it for the good of others.  Some are simply uninhibited in their own wants.  We know this to be historically true.  We know this to be presently true.

Today, in America, it is those called the Deplorables who by and large assert their self-ownership, their right to choose their own values, and their right to manage their own lives.  They have a greater sense of self-responsibility than do the socialists.  The Deplorables do not want the heavy boot of government upon their necks.  They almost entirely work in the private sector.

Opposing them are the Socialist Elitists, who are sure they have the right to use the force of govenment to claim at least substantial ownership of every American, to indoctrinate and program Americans to accept heavy government rule using their monopoly on education and control of massive government contracts and welfare programs, and to regulate with a heavy hand virtually every economic activity of the People.  These Socialist Elitists gravitate to positions in education, media, lobbies, and government.  Those in government settle in comfortably into its myriad agencies and official positions.  The lobbyists fill law firms, promotion and publicist firms, professional groups, environmental groups, animal rights groups, firms promoting the interests of foreign powers, defense companies, alternative energy companies, and labor union leadership positions.  Almost all educators work in government-run schools or colleges highly dependent upon government grants and student loans and scholarships.  The media, whether print, broadcast or Internet based, want the power to control the news that gets to the People.  They choose what is newsworthy and put the spin on it that suits them.  Controlling information and its access is their game.  While the term swamp creatures is usually applied to those Socialist Elitists in government and lobbying positions, it ought to also include educators, media workers, and the many special interest groups that thrive on government money or laws biased to their special interests.

One of the Granddaddies of all Swamp Creatures is Joe Biden, the beneficiary of the highly unconstitutional election of 2020.  The unconstitutional nature of the election was assiduously planned and worked for by the Democratic Socialist Party that so craves power and harbors the great majority of the worst Swamp Creatures.  The unconstitutional election rule changes, which violated the election laws passed by the state legislatures as empowered by the Constitution, were generally designed to enable radical Democratic Socialist Party groups to cast the votes of the dead, non-citizens, those who had moved from a prior address, felons who had lost the right to vote, massive numbers of mailed ballots that never reached the addresses they were mailed to, and simply printed ballots pretending to be mailed-in ballots.  This power-lusting party arranged to prevent observers adequate access and viewing to monitor the nefarious activities at many of the ballot counting facilities under the control of the Democratic Socialist Party.  One does not do this if one is not cheating.  One does not do this if one has confidence in Americans to make a good democratic choice of their President.  But if you want desperately to put the non-campaigning, granddaddy of all Swamp Creatures into the Presidency, you do not want to have a democratic election protected by constitutional requirements.  And who cares about earning the respect of the American People when all you want is the right to Lord it over them.

The Socialist Elitists are those who lust for power over the American People and for the money they can extract from the productive work of the Americans in the private sector who are more harmed by government than helped by it.  The Deplorables serve as the hosts upon whom the Swamp Creature Parasites thrive.  Interestingly, many of the Socialist Elites defame the Deplorables because they understand the ignominy of being a parasite dependent upon its host.  These are the knowingly evil ones.  Of course, others are so deluded with their claims that they hurt the many for the benefit of the few weak, that they claim this as a badge of honor.  They resent anyone who attempts to strip this justification for their evil acts from them.  The Deplorables who would deny them the use of force to benefit the few weak are hated for depriving them of an easily attained and unjustified sense of virtue.  An act of virtue one gets credit for, which costs you little since you transfer the costs of others, is hard to give up.

Trump Derangement Syndrome -- the state of mind when a claimed Elitist is denied his false sense of morality and largely revealed as a parasite by a very self-assured critic determined to reduce the power of government to interfere with the People managing their own lives.  The Liberator is strongly resented.

I will grant that President Trump does not seem to be entirely self-assured as a man, but he was generally self-assured that those who view themselves as the Elite did not have the right to micro-manage the lives of Americans.  He reduced taxes and regulations to allow productive work to blossom to the absolute horror of the Elitists.  He was determined to control the borders so that the laws on immigration and nationalization were obeyed. He opposed the destruction of the carbon-based fuel industries.  He was an advocate for American manufacturing, while the Democrats continued to view manufacturers as rapists of Gaia and wished to chase them out of the country with a proliferation of highly irrational regulations.  He opposed the Elitist claim that China should be treated as a Most Favored Nation.  He was forthright about China's role in exporting its coronavirus and was critical about its human rights violations.  He recognized China's increased belligerence and determination to dominate the world militarily.  He pushed NATO members to live up to their commitments.   He favored the building of safe pipelines to deliver fuel around the country and to our ports.  He spoke up against violations of constitutional elections, while the Elitists and Swamp Creatures are counting on those violations to keep them in power even after the People will rise against them in the next election for their use of power excesses.  Because of these actions, the American economy had boomed prior to the advent of the Chinese Communist Party coronavirus invasion.  Black and Hispanic Americans had been the greatest beneficiaries of this booming economy.  President Trump took particular pride in their increased prosperity.

The Socialist Elitists responded to the Liberator's efforts with desperate claims he was a rascist and those who voted for him were also.  They claimed the Liberator was a despot and some kind of fascist.  They twice voted to impeach him on false charges. Their claims were indeed deranged, but they were widely believed in academia, the media, and in government.  This belief was near universal in the Democratic Socialist Party, which is not at all democratic, but is highly socialist.  The Republican Party also has its denizens of government power who opposed the Liberator's efforts.  National Review, The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project, The American Prospect, and a host of ex-officials who loved doing business in Washington the way it used to be done.  Even many Libertarians and Objectivists joined with the oppositon to the Liberator's efforts because he did not believe in open borders, free trade with thieves and slaveholders who were arming to the teeth for future wars of aggression, and traditional decorum.  Some even said they opposed him because he did not have sufficient trust in the foreign policy and intelligence advisors, despite the track record of their past decisions.  This included the backing many of them gave to the first nefarious attempt to impeach Trump and to the first successful attempt to impeach him on false grounds.  The Liberator was too disruptive for many Libertarians and Objectivists, who apparently have become traditionalists, or should we say conservatives, who would rather pursue a course of on-going compromise with the Socialist Elitists than be so disruptive as to do actual battle with them.

Should the Deplorables respect the swamp creature declared the winner of the unconstitutional 2020 presidential election?  Most certainly not.  Respect of the President is dependent upon the context that the President is actually trying to uphold his oath of office to protect the Constitution.

That context assumes the President actually believes in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which Joe Biden has explicitly stated holds no role in American law.  If the Constitution is not held to be the instrument by which the federal government is held accountable to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then one can understand the train of abuses of our Constitution that the Democratic Socialist Party is particularly determined to pursue.  It becomes easy for them to ignore the enumeration of the very limited powers of the government.  Unbounded by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, they re-interpret clause after clause of the Constititution to enlarge the powers of government.  The taxation power to fund the enumerated powers becomes an excuse to make any law as long as it includes a tax, as made clear by Supreme Court Justice Roberts' ruling on ObamaCare.  The regulation of commerce, intended to make the entire USA a free market for trade, is converted into a means to prevent those in the private sector from trading freely with one another.  The statement that the Constitution was intended to provide for the welfare of the People by ensuring their liberties, became a justification for any act said to be for their welfare, even as that act deprived individuals of their rights.  Even the principle of the Declaration of Independence that a legitimate government must have the consent of the governed is ignored by the Socialist Elitists.

Joe Biden has fully and willingly embraced these abuses.  This is the most solid of reason to deny this man any respect at all, let alone that measure of respect one would grant a man honestly trying to perform his duties as President of the United States of America.  To top this off, Biden is a long-time crime syndicate head.  He has abused his lifetime of public offices by selling his hold on government power to special interests, including the Russian faction in Ukraine and the Chinese Communist Party in Red China.  After Hilary Clinton's defeat, Joe Biden took a job at the University of Pennsylvania as the non-teaching Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at a salary of $900,000 to lead the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, DC funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  The Penn Biden Center was a transition depot for a number of Biden appointees, all of whom are tainted by its funding source.  Not too surprisingly, Biden has failed to recognize the great harm the CCP did in exporting its coronavirus to the rest of the world.  Biden believes that more trade with Red China is a wonderful thing.  This man is not only a power-luster, but he is knowingly willing to hurt America to further his family's wealth.

The Office of the President depends on the respect of the American People for much of its power.  Withhold that respect from Joe Biden.  He does not deserve it.  In fact, given his and his party's long train of abuses, we are obligated to oppose his program adamently in every case in which it erodes our freedom to exercise our many and broad individual rights.  For my part, I will honor those who stand with me on the bulwarks to defend our individual rights.

Governments derive their Just Powers from the Consent of the Governed

 "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, at to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."

This quote from our Declaration of Independence directly addresses the purposes of a legitimate government founded in those purposes and upon the consent of the governed.  This great document is actually the foundation upon which our Constitution rests.  It advises the People to exercise prudence in overthrowing their government, but it also advises them that it is their duty to do so when that government develops a history revealing an attempt to place the People under an absolute Despotism.  Joe Biden explicitly and forcefully denied that the Declaration of Independence plays a legal role in our government.  He has clearly stated that he does not believe in the principles set forth in our Declaration of Independence.  His reason --- he has always been bent upon a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations.

Before the American Colonies rose up in rebellion against Great Britain, its Parliament, and its King, the People spent a decade during which at first only a few and then slowly growing numbers of them defied the government.  They tarred and feathered tax collectors, they smuggled goods, they armed themselves, and they manufactured goods at least in small quantities that they were told they had to buy from Great Britain.  They had no say in the selection of the members of the Parliament, which was quite absolutely controlled by those who saw themselves as the Elite and saw the colonists as the Primitives (Read Deplorables).

The leadership of the Democratic Socialist Party and many of its voters see themselves as the Elitists who by right should govern and control the lives of most Americans, who they call the Deplorables if they are in opposition to being so controlled and micromanaged.  Of course, they see many of their own voters as deplorables who are incompetent in the management of their own lives as well, but they are less likely to publically label them as such.  You have to think through what their policies imply about those Democratic Party voters to understand how deplorable the Elite believe a large fraction of their own voters to be.  These Elitists are the equivalent of the aristocracy of Great Britain who were the detritus for the Medieval Period.  Unfortunately, those who lust for power over others seem to recognize no limits upon their reign -- not the American Revolution, not the Constitution, and not 231 years of living more or less under our Constitution.  The evil lust for power over others is the great sin of many people.  It is the worst sin among us.  That sin is not lessened by the fact that most people who exercise the sin against us believe they are doing it for our own good.

We just had an election which was unconstitutional and very, very crooked.  It was unconstitutional because the constitutional requirement that state legislatures establish the voting laws was widely violated by election officials, by numerous court rulings, and by Democrat poll workers.  If only constitutionally valid votes were counted, President Trump would have been easily re-elected.  This would, at this time, certainly deprive many citizens of their vote, so there is no good way to correct this horrible fault.  One can only reform the voting system so that it never happens again, though the chances of that happening now that the Democrat Socialist Party completely controls the federal government is looking quite dim.

If only the counts were counted that were cast by legitimate voters, we will never know for sure who would have won the presidential election.  I think it most likely that Trump would have won, as do many other Americans.  There were just too many cases of votes being counted in Democrat strongholds with inadequate observation and with a failure to rigorously check the voter signatures of mail-in ballots.  There were too many cases of allowing votes to be cast by the dead, non-citizens, and those who had moved away from the address that they had voted from.  There were too many cases in which the voter registration roles were purposely very obsolete, in violation of federal law.  There were too many cases of people either receiving ballots they had not requested in contradiction of state law or cases of people being told they had been sent ballots that they never received.  There were too many tales of mail-in ballots being counted that had never been folded to fit into the required envelops.  There were too many cases in which barriers were put up to block the view of observers, where observers were required to be too far away to be effective, or where observers were told the counting was stopping, yet it continued once they left.  There were too many cases of thousands and even tens of thousands of votes being subtracted from the count that should only have increased or remained constant for a period.  There were too many cases of votes coming in from precincts at a rate that their counting equipment could not possibly achieve.  There were absolutely unbelievable votes from many precincts, both in terms of total numbers in terms of the division of votes between Biden and Trump.  This was a very, very crooked election and a large fraction of the American People understand that it was.

The election was unconstitutional, illegitimate, and invalid.  It was such because the Democratic Socialist Party has long planned to make it such and ensured that it was particularly crooked in those areas they have long governed locally.  The long Train of election Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evincing a Design to reduce the People under the absolute Despotism of the Democratic Socialist Party.

I am not yet at 1775.  I do not condone the violence and destruction that happened at the Capitol on 6 January.  I do think we will see many more such events if the election process is not made constitutional and fair.  I do not think Americans will sit quietly and obey the government when their sovereign and constitutional right to provide their consent to be governed has been violated.

I personally have no respect for the incoming federal government.  I have no respect in any case for people who want to usurp my freedom to choose my own values and to manage my own life.  At some level, many Americans do share this view, though very few to the extent that I do.  I have a huge resentment when anyone, especially people as stupid and wrongheaded as Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and a host of government bureaucrats, forcefully attempts to micromanage my life.  I will resist their despotism as much as I possibly can, but I will keep that resistance peaceful.  For now.

The federal government under the Biden Despotic Regime will make every attempt to prevent state government from making future elections constitutional and fair.  So if we are ever again to have a constitutional and fair election, we the People, will have to be insistent in our demands that the state governments insure such legitimate elections.  If this effort is not successful, then the time for rebellion will have come.  We must not allow the Despotic Elitists to control our sovereign, individual lives.

The Many Rights of the Individual

Two hundred and forty two years ago, the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, which states

“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 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.”

The idea that every person has unalienable rights by virtue of the nature of man which are not dependent upon a government granting or recognizing those rights is very frightful to socialists or any other supporters of tyrannical government.  They hate the Declaration of Independence.  They hate the fact that it declares that the only justifiable reason for government is its dedication to the protection and support of every single individual’s rights.  They hate the fact that the Declaration of Independence states clearly that when government acts to deprive men of their equal, individual rights, then it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it.

The Declaration of Independence is not the only essential American governing document that the socialists hate.  Barack Obama declared in a radio interview when he was an Illinois state senator in its state legislature that he did not like the U.S. Constitution because it was a barrier to socialism.  Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan just wrote in the opinion of the four dissenting justices of the Supreme Court in the Janus case that decided that public employees cannot be forced to pay union dues that the majority were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”  The five justices of the majority had used freedom of speech as the reason for not allowing unions to forcibly collect union dues or even to collect them as a default unless a public employee underwent a process to deny the union the right to collect the money from his paycheck.

Justice Kagan and many others of the left have become very incensed that freedom of speech and freedom of religion have been used to thwart them in their dictation of how Americans can think and act.  They are terribly upset that people associating with one another in business were allowed freedom of speech in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010.  They have been incensed that some businesses have been able to escape infringements of their right to freedom of association by virtue of claiming their freedom of religion, whether in their hiring practices or in their wedding cake baking services.  The present session of the Supreme Court also used freedom of speech to deny the socialist California legislature to require organizations giving advice to pregnant women to tell them about their options to have an abortion.  Hence the socialists or Progressive Elitists are more and more horrified by the individual rights recognized in the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, those who favor a government whose functions violate the individual rights of some, often in the name of providing more security or comfort for others, have long been able to keep the courts from recognizing the many individual rights which were supposed to be protected by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.  It was recognized when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution that individuals had many rights not explicitly dealt with in the earlier amendments of the Bill of Rights.

What are our individual rights, whether recognized by our government are not?

• The right to life, not to be supported, but to be allowed to act to support it ourselves, as we allow others to do so also.  This is a general right to manage our own life and to fully claim self-ownership.
• The right to determine our own actions and to undertake them, provided we do not act to prevent others from determining their own actions and undertaking them with all of us barred from the initiated use of force.
• The right to choose our own values and to pursue those values to try to achieve our own happiness.
• The freedom of conscience, the right to use our own judgment and to act upon it.  Freedom of religion is a subset of this right and is far from all-inclusive.
• The freedom of association, which is also the freedom to choose who we will cooperate with and for what purposes.  This includes our domestic partnerships, our business partnerships, our hiring choices, our freedom of contract, our choice of friends, and those we join in our recreational activities.
• Freedom of speech or communication of our thoughts and ideas in all the forms this may take.  The freedom of assembly is part of this, as it is part of our freedom of association.
• The freedom of privacy, or the freedom not to share those parts of our lives we do not wish to share knowledge of with others.  This includes the right to be secure in our papers, our homes, and such as prescribed in the 4th Amendment.
• The freedom of equal protection of our income and property and the other fruits of our labor and thought.
• The right to own and bear arms so that we might protect our own lives and individual rights.
• The right to fair and just treatment when accused of a crime as prescribed in our 5th , 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments.

I will not claim this to be an all-inclusive list of our natural rights.  I do not claim that life is so simple that it is always easy to understand how one individual’s exercise of his rights will affect others as they try to exercise their own rights.  But, good societies and good governments -- legitimate governments – will always try very hard to make individual liberty their primary goal and will defer as much as is possible to the individual’s right to make his own value choices and manage his own life.  No legitimate government can take the stance that it is justified in violating the rights of some in the interest of other persons.  Legitimate government cannot violate any person’s rights.  It must respect the equal rights of every citizen and legal resident.

A society with such a legitimate government will be one which minimizes the use of force.  The government should act to prevent all individuals from initiating the use of force.  That government also minimizes its restraints on liberty such that its own use of force is also minimized.  Government which violates individual rights does so by the use of force or its threatened use.  Governments are commonly the worst abusers of the use of force in the nations of the world today.  There are no highly legitimate governments operating at this time.  Some are much less worse than others, but all are massive abusers of the rights of the individual.  The United States federal government violates very many of our rights today and American socialists and Progressive Elitists want it to violate many more of our individual rights.

Many Americans, whether socialists or religious traditionalists, want to use government to prescribe a moral code by which everyone is expected to live.  They are often certain that their moral code is right and that a good society can be achieved if only the government will force everyone to live by their moral code.  The fact that there is often more variation in the moral codes held by the political factions pursuing such moral code prescriptions by law than could possibly be encoded into law rarely dawns on them.  These same people, especially the socialists, are very inclined to either use government or extra-governmental force and intimidation to prevent dissenters from their moral ideas from exercising their freedom of speech, press, and assembly.  According to the socialists and sometimes those who speak for God, if you have morally wrong ideas, you forfeit your freedom of speech, press, and assembly.

No freedom is a freedom at all if one will not allow those you think are wrong from exercising their freedom.  There is no freedom of speech if a minority or a single individual is not allowed to state their own ideas.  There is no freedom of association if one is not allowed to discriminate in the choosing of those one wishes to associate with, even if that discrimination may be what many may call bigotry.

The Christian who refuses to associate with gay people is wrong in my opinion, but he is acting fully within his rights.  To make him bake a cake for a gay wedding may very well be an infringement upon his freedom of conscience.

The gay organizations that want to force non-discrimination against gay people outside of the government itself are very wrong in doing so.  They should be as determined to protect their own freedom of association and conscience as anyone else should be.  Imagine a law that requires every gay bar to bring in heterosexual people until they represent their proportion in the population at large among their customers each night when the federal inspectors come around to make a count at the bar.

Many of the religious conservatives were very unhappy about the Supreme Court ruling allowing gay marriages.  In fact, this should have been a very obvious requirement respecting freedom of association.  Unfortunately, our government does not actually recognize the freedom of association.  It also very much limits the freedom of contract in general.  In reality, people should have as much freedom in forming their domestic partnerships under contract as they would have in forming a business partnership.  If three men and three women wanted to form a domestic partnership, that is their right as much as it would be the right of one woman and one man.  The same is true for one woman and two men or for two men and one woman or for three men or for three women.  The government has no business interfering with such an exercise in freedom of association and freedom of contract.  What such domestic partnerships might aim to accomplish and their sexual relationships are not government business, except insofar as the adults entering into the contract choose to make those matters a part of their lawful domestic partnership contract.

A much more harmonious society results when government is not being extensively used as a tool to prevent individuals from exercising their broad and many individual rights.  There are many claims that we live in an very uncivil society today.  Well, what do you expect when we have to fight over the control of a government that is constantly willing and wanting to violate our rights.  When we have a government that loves to take more from the rich and redistribute it to the many more voters who are not as rich, do the rich not have a right to believe they are threatened by that government?  If the rich use their money and connections to manipulate the regulatory state so that it is much harder for small, upstart companies to compete with their larger companies, is it not reasonable that the small businessmen will be very upset?  If the federal government owns half the land in a state and it controls the use of that land so that the environmentalists on the left and right coasts are happy, is it not to be expected that many in the state where that land is not of use to them are going to be unhappy?  If you are a coal miner, a river barge operator, a store owner in a coal town, or a dock worker in Norfolk, VA, is it not reasonable that you will be very unhappy when the federal government decides that a pregnant woman eating only fish from a river downwind from a coal-fired power plant might according to very imaginative argument and highly cherry-picked studies of islanders who only eat seafood develop some problem due to mercury released from coal combustion so that coal-fired power plants are being shutdown?  Or you want to build an office building, but you have to wait 5 years before starting as you work through endless environmental studies which keep requiring you to spend more and more on the building itself, not to mention the lawyers fees.

Then there is the shear weight of the taxes.  You are young and you do not expect Social Security to be around in 40 years when you might retire, but you are paying into it out of every paycheck, instead of putting that money into your own retirement investment fund.  Medicare costs will exceed its revenues in 2026 according to the ever-changing projections, so if that program is still going to be around, you will have to pay higher Medicare taxes soon.  Meanwhile, you may still be struggling to pay off the money you borrowed to go to college.  Thanks to all of that loan money available, the colleges built themselves up like spas for the rich, but the education you received was no better and maybe worse than the education people received 30 years earlier, but you paid much more for it.

Perhaps you are struggling to start a new business and the paperwork required by the governments and by your business customers is overwhelming, thanks to big government.  Meanwhile, you need to buy equipment so you can expand, but the county personal property tax penalizes you for having that equipment, making it harder for you to hire more people.  The more people you hire the more the governments expect you to act as an unpaid tax collector.  If you do business across state lines, you now have to worry about collecting sales taxes for each and every one of many thousands of taxing authorities even though you have no presence in their areas and no vote to determine the taxes or the politicians who decide to levy them.  Imagine the deluge of paperwork now coming your way.

When the governments do too much and forget the principle that their legitimate function is simply to protect everyone’s equal individual rights, then it is pitting the people against one another.  Good people are simply trying to protect themselves from the hurt that the government can do to them.  Immoral people are very happy to try to wrest control of government so they can take advantage of most of the people.  If you think there are not endless numbers of schemes or conspiracies to do just that in Washington, you are very naive indeed.  The evil-doers are some foundations, environmental groups, people who want welfare, labor unions, educators, scientists, professions that want restrictive licenses, and many businesses, not to mention many politicians.

It is absolute pie in the sky nonsense to think government should hurt some and violate the rights of some in order to help some greater number or the most needy.  Government will start with some plausible such proposal that almost everyone will agree with.  After it has established numerous such programs, the people will no longer have the time or will to think about them.  The government arguments for the next set of programs can be much less plausible now.  Soon it is a free-for-all.  Soon one has what we have now, government for special interests.  The people are bewildered and no longer in effective control.  Some simply trust to the authorities, but most Americans are now very jaded.  But, this is exactly what should have been expected when we allowed government to disregard a strict adherence to its legitimate role as the protector of every individual’s many and broad rights.  When we give this up as a critical and essential principle, we give up all hope for a just, fair, and harmonious society.

Judge Neil Gorsuch Says the Declaration of Independence Is Not Foundational Law

Under questioning by Ben Sasse, Republican Senator from Nebraska, Judge Neil Gorsuch said that the Constitution is the foundational law.  The Declaration of Independence is not, though it is informative of the background of the Constitution and should not be lightly discarded.  Unfortunately, Judge Gorsuch did not discuss the fact that the Declaration of Independence is the primary statement of the philosophy behind the Constitution.  He neglected to say that the Declaration of Independence is the American document that defines the legitimate purpose of government -- the protection of the rights of the individual.

It is the Declaration of Independence that makes it clear that sovereignty resides in the individual, not in government.  Government exists to serve the sovereign individual, the holder of rights.  The individual and his rights exist whether government does or not.  Government does not define individual rights.  It is the nature of man and his need to survive and flourish in life that define individual rights.  An understanding of this is absolutely necessary to make it possible for government to fulfill its legitimate purpose in protecting everyone's individual rights.

The Bill of Rights enumerated some individual rights.  Yet that same document, in the 9th Amendment, made it crystal clear that the enumeration of individual rights was incomplete and that the federal government was not "to deny or disparage the other rights retained by the people." Unfortunately, the federal courts have attributed almost no protections to individual rights under this 9th Amendment, having virtually ignored the broad scope of individual rights acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence as those of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The 14th Amendment also recognizes the broad individual rights of citizens: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Absent the context of preexisting and preeminent individual rights, the protections of those rights by the government are bound to be haphazard at best.  More likely, the government itself will become the greatest threat to individual rights.  The fact that the Declaration of Independence is not considered a foundational document in the law drastically undermines our understanding of the purpose of government, its proper limits, and the effectiveness of the Constitution to fulfill its contract with the people to provide "a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, ..."

It is very disturbing when politicians and judges prove themselves to be rudderless before their essential and only task of protecting individual rights.  There is no way that a knowledge of these individual rights is or can be spelled out by a few short documents.  The Constitution is itself a given document whose meaning is the Law of the Land.  It is not a changing or living document and it must be interpreted in accordance with its original meaning.  When and if one cannot do that, it should be amended.

What is living and evolving is our understanding of individual rights.  The Constitution literally makes it clear that we are to see to it that the government protects everyone's equal individual rights as these rights are understood in terms of man's nature and the reality in which he lives.  The use of this understanding of man's rights is not a matter of changing the meaning of the Constitution.  Its meaning was always to provide a very limited government whose purpose was the protection of individual rights.  There is no other interpretation of the Constitution which is self-consistent, rational, and legitimate.

Freedom of speech has evolved since the time of the Constitution's adoption as the Law of the Land. It still means that one has the right to say what one wants to those within hearing range, but it also now means that one has the freedom to buy a radio or a television station and say what one wants through that medium, or that one can say what one wants in a video posted to You Tube.  Similarly, property and labor rights have evolved in many ways to include new forms of contracts and new forms of intellectual property.  It has come to be recognized that domestic partnership contracts have to equally recognize the partnerships of two people of the same sex, as well as those of two people of the opposite sex.  Not to do so is a violation of the principle of the equal protection of individual rights necessary to the right to pursue one's happiness.  One can only hope that our broad right to freedom of association will one day be more recognized than it is now.  As these changes have occurred and will continue to occur in our real lives, the 9th and 14th Amendments should be constant as sources of the justification for protecting these individual rights. No change in the Constitution is needed to protect individual rights, despite their evolving nature.

To be clear:  I am not a believer in a living Constitution.  I believe that it is our understanding of individual rights that is changing.  To some degree, those individual rights are themselves evolving as the conditions of man's existence in reality change.  Most of that change is the result of man using his rational faculty to improve and control the world in which he lives.  We need judges throughout our judicial system who understand that the Constitution itself should be interpreted literally and always in such a manner as to maximize the protection of individual rights.  These same judges should be open to understanding our individual rights and prepared to expand their range.  It is not the Constitution which is the primary basis for rational law.  The primary basis is the protection of individual rights.  The Constitution is an important and critical tool to limit the powers of government and to direct its actions toward the equal protection of every citizen's many and broad individual rights.  This is the critical context for all valid constitutional law -- indeed for any valid law.

It is sadly the case that Judge Neil Gorsuch seems to defer too much to any existing law and any prior interpretation of the law whether or not they violate these principles of legitimate government.  It appears that Justice Clarence Thomas will remain the best of the Supreme Court justices.

Independence Day Thoughts on Freedom

When Americans declared their independence from Great Britain 240 years ago, they were a people who were largely self-employed and proud to manage their own lives.  They believed they had no need for a government to choose their values for them and to micromanage their lives.  Their principal need for a government was to prevent individuals from initiating the use of force against one another and to protect them from outlaw gangs, warring Indians, and attacks by other nations. Most of those needs they were quite willing to fulfill in large part at the very local level, including a local militia. They certainly did not need a government dominated by special interests and aristocrats a long distance away from them dictating numerous laws and taxing them.

But what is the American condition today?  Relatively few people are self-employed.  The result is that relatively few people believe that they are capable of controlling their own lives.  For the ease of being an employee, most people have given up the ability to earn their own living under their own management.  Most people have consequently lost a key ingredient to their independence and their self-confidence.  This is a loss partly brought on by political decisions in which a people more and more frequently employed by others came to be in greater and greater numbers in the electorate. Frustrated with their lack of control and holding a great political power in their numbers, but lacking self-direction, these Americans became susceptible to special interests who wanted to gain power and wealth at the expense of the less numerous employers who had made their wealth in a largely free market.  More and more legislation came to regulate employers and to transfer their wealth to groups politically favored by government.  This further weakened the spirit of self-sufficiency, independent mindedness, and encouraged the creation of huge barriers to starting and operating businesses. Americans became more and more dependent upon their government and the whims of the special interests that came to control that ever more powerful government.

Today, government and the education system it dominates insist that we are not really individuals at all.  No, we are simply members in some identity group.  White males are only capable of thinking like a stereotypical white male does.  Black males are only capable of thinking as a stereotypical black male does.  Those exceptions, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, Dr. Thomas Sowell, and Professor Walter E. Williams are simply abominations abhorrent to nature and traitors to their group identity.  In an interesting twist, it is fine however for a white male to think outside his abhorred group, provided he thinks like one of the approved identity groups.  Well, that is true to a fair degree, though there are increasing numbers who now resent such a person's theft of their identity.  Overall, our special interest serving government found it very convenient to lump Americans into a few groups so that we might be divided and controlled more readily.  This also serves the critically important function of obscuring the fact that the government cannot know us as individuals and cannot do anything but suppress our individuality with its ever-increasing legislation and regulations. People will be less aware of the suppression of their individuality if they have been taught that they only have a group identity.  This is a fundamentally collectivist idea.

Americans are a self-contradictory group these days.  They want less government, but they rarely want to give up any program that currently exists, except for ObamaCare, maybe.  They want the government to spend less, except on a few new programs that they want.  They are not infrequently willing to break a law they think the government will not notice, but they are eager to create new laws to prevent others from doing anything that might aggravate them.  Indeed, Congress is held in super-low regard because it is so often in gridlock, though the last time it was not in gridlock it passed the hated ObamaCare act.  Generally, the people believe that a legislature is not doing its job unless it is passing loads of new laws.

Now, because I view the only legitimate function of government, as did the Declaration of Independence, as being the protection of the rights of each and every individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of personal happiness, I see little need for new laws doing what most new laws have done in recent decades.  Most new laws further restrict the freedom of action of at least some Americans, though most laws are aimed at a minority subset of Americans if great harm is to be done to them.  Those laws restricting most Americans are usually designed to cause them only a small and largely unnoticed loss, but which in the aggregate allows a substantial transfer of wealth or power to a small, politically favored special interest group.  After many decades of following such a "practical" and unprincipled political course, we now have a government that does most Americans far more harm than it does us good.

We do presently have a need for much new legislation.  We need to repeal decades of laws that have interfered with our natural individual rights.  We have far too many laws providing for the theft of the value of the hours many put into productive work.  We have far too many restrictions on our freedom of association.  We have far too many prohibitions against our exercise of freedom of conscience, which includes, but is not limited to, our freedom of religion.  We have ever more constraints on freedom of speech and of the press.  Our property rights are in frequent jeopardy, whether it be to use our property for production or to keep it from being confiscated because some law enforcement arm of government imagines that it might have been used in a crime or even only that some action involving it fits a pattern of some organized crime or terrorist action, however implausibly that may apply to this particular property owner.

It is an interesting phenomena, though only one among many contradictions, that those who favor ever-larger government are constantly making claims that human activities cannot be sustained by the environment, yet ever-increasing spending based on the confiscation of the fruits of productive work can be sustained without limit.  So let us review a few charts on government growth provided by the Cato Institute:

Since 1900, Federal spending went from 2.8% of GDP to 21.4% of GDP in 2016, which is a 7.6-fold increase.  Total state and local government spending increased by only 2.2 times in comparison.  The more local government is, it would appear, the more solid the constraints on its spending.  Now that government spending is such a large part of the economy, it is critical that we stop using GDP as the measure since that government spending is actually counted as GDP.  Yet that money has to be produced outside government, while only a fraction of government spending is returned to the government for spending from taxes on money earned by doing the governments' bidding.  Total government spending here is 32.4% of GDP.  The Non-Government GDP (NG GDP) is then 67.6%. If government taxed the functions it spends money on at the same rate it taxes the general private sector economic activities then one could estimate that 32.4% of the money spent by governments is returned to government in taxes of the money spent by governments.  So, 0.324 times 32.4% is 10.5%.  The reality is that government actually taxes these activities at much lower rates.  It is probably generous to assume that taxes return 5% of the government money spent.  So let us subtract 5% from total government spending to find the drag that government spending itself puts on the private sector economy.  Net total government spending of (32.4 - 5.0)% /  67.6% = 40.5%, which is substantially more than the 32.4% the presentation of the data against the GDP provides us.  Let us bear this in mind as we look at some more charts of our unsustainable government growth.

The national defense is certainly a legitimate function of the government and it has a constitutional validation in the enumerated powers of the government.  This represents 15% of federal spending and it certainly includes some waste and abuse and suffers from the greatly diverted attention of our hired managers in Congress.  Interest payments are justified by the Constitution, but there is no legitimate reason for those payments to have grown to be 6% of the budget.  That is a percentage which would rise rapidly if we did not have an economy suppressed by government requirements that have greatly reduced the velocity of money in the economy.  The All Other Activities covers a few constitutionally valid functions, such as some of the foreign affairs activities, the post offices and post roads, the minting of money, immigration controls, the maintenance of weight and measure standards, the operation of the Patent Office, and the operation of the federal courts at a level appropriate for a nation of many fewer laws and regulations.  Had a proper philosophy of government prevailed, as stated in the Declaration of Independence and mandated by the Constitution, the spending of our present federal government would be closer to 20% of its present spending than to 25% of present spending.

Since 1970, it sure is a good thing that defense spending as a percentage of the GDP has trended down substantially and that non-defense discretionary spending has come down a bit, because entitlement spending has climbed prodigiously.  Entitlement spending has no constitutional basis and no basis in the legitimate function of government as defined in the Declaration of Independence.  It is generally funded by the theft of the fruits of the productive work of Americans so that it can be rerouted to those favored politically by those who lust for the power to distribute the money.  This huge expansion of entitlement spending makes the so-called beneficiaries dependent upon the government, which suits the government just fine.

An appreciation of the degree to which our government has become one dominated by special interests would not be realistic if we did not acknowledge the huge increase in federal subsidy programs shown above.

This final graph is the number of pages in the Federal Register from Wayne Crews' Ten Thousand Commandments 2016 report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In the 1940s and the 1950s the total number of pages of final regulations in the Federal Register for the decade were running at about 110,00 pages a decade.  In the decade from 2001 -2010 the number of pages had grown to 730,176.  Presumably, the government considers it our duty to have read all of these regulations so that we might abide by them.  Did you do your government mandated duty?  Remember, ignorance is no defense for violating the law or any regulation.  More and more of the binding regulations or the interpretation of the regulations can only be found in court proceedings or in website announcements of the thousands of government regulatory agencies, which the government itself cannot enumerate. Good luck you lost, ignorant soul if the government decides to come after you.  Do you trust the likes of Obama, Hillary, or The Donald not to do so?

Oh that we might be free!  It would be incredibly wonderful to celebrate the 4th of July as a free man.
It would be a joy to be among free men who had maintained the principles of freedom set forth in the Declaration of Independence and then largely implemented in the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1791.  To live in a society based on the free trade of values in a rich and robust private sector rather than one dominated by the forceful taking of wealth and service by governments would be to live in a genuinely life-sustaining society.  It is not possible to imagine how much our standard of living would be improved with the flowering of productivity, creativity, justice, and benevolence one would find in such a society.

Rationally Choosing a President

As an American with the right to vote for President, how does one rationally exercise that right?

The first task the rational individual has is to determine what the legitimate purpose of government is and how government acts to achieve that purpose.  It is easier to understand how government acts to achieve its purposes, than it is to understand what its legitimate purposes are.  Government achieves its purposes by using force.  If challenged by any of the people it governs, it is willing to use overwhelming and fatal force.  It is the nature of government that it achieves its ends through the use of force.  Without a clear understanding of that and which of many purposes it may have that are legitimate, it is not possible to make a rational choice of that government's chief executive officer.

Many people believe that government exists to enforce a morality upon a society.  Thus that portion of the left which is long educated in the government-controlled education system commonly believes that some groups deserve to be treated by everyone nicely.  These groups are usually people they see as systematically discriminated against or as rather helpless.  If those of the favored groups are not treated nicely by someone, the government should use force to see that those who are not nice will act nice.  On the other hand, that portion of the right which believes in religious fundamentalism largely believes that everyone should be forced to live in accordance with what they think Christianity requires of moral people.  There is some overlap in these two groups' ideas of morality, but there are also important differences.  What they have in common is a belief that it is right to have government enforce their idea of moral behavior upon those whose ideas of moral behavior differ from theirs or upon people who sin by not living up to the morality they themselves may recognize.

Neither group believes in a broad concept of freedom of conscience.  Because both groups are broadly willing to use force to achieve their goal of moral uniformity in individual's relationships with one another, neither believes in a broad concept of freedom of association either.  The socialist elitist group of the left and the Christian fundamentalist group of the right are the most polarized groups willing to use force to make every individual comply with their moral beliefs, but this is actually a trait of most Americans.

It does not dawn on most Americans that it is from a broad individual right to freedom of conscience and freedom of association that all of the individual rights that most think they should have arise.  Why should an individual have freedom of speech?  Because freedom of speech enables people to develop, with feedback from others, and trade the knowledge they need to survive and flourish on Earth in the midst of powerful natural forces and other people.  Freedom of speech is often opposed by those who wish to suppress the knowledge and understanding that may result.  A crucial portion of that knowledge and understanding is about a moral code suitable to sustaining life as a thinking and living being.  Freedom of speech is critical as a support for developing learning, identifying values to pursue, earning a living by production, and trading values with other individuals.

Today's socialist elitists are often weak on freedom of speech because they argue it can be hurtful to some among those groups they favor or think are incapable of managing their own lives.  Not infrequently, they even believe that scientific pursuit of knowledge should be suppressed if it might cause people to disagree with part of their belief system.  This is most apparent if those who disagree are pursuing profits in trade or disagree with their ideas about evolution or man's relationship with the environment.  The fundamentalist right sometimes forces the teaching of Intelligent Design or forces counseling prior to a woman having an abortion.  Freedom of speech means we have the right to say what we think, but also that we have the right not to be forced to listen to those we disagree with.  Real freedom of speech also rests in freedom of association.  We have the right to speak to those who want to listen to us.  Freedom of the press is just the right to put our thoughts on paper or electronic media and distribute them to those who want to read what we have written.  Consequently, freedom of press also has a foundation in our broad freedoms of conscience and association.

Of course, freedom of religion is just a subset of our broad freedom of conscience.  Indeed, the two were often conflated when the early state constitutions were formulated and in the debates about the federal Constitution.  Freedom of religion is clearly both about a set of beliefs and the freedom to gather with others of similar belief, as is our broader freedom of conscience.  Freedom of conscience, really the freedom to think and to act upon what we think, is inseparable from freedom of association in our interaction with others in a society.  Thus, when a socialist elitist has the government use force to make a Christian fundamentalist baker bake a cake for a gay wedding or to make one pay for a woman's abortion, that socialist elitist is violating the Christian fundamentalist's freedom of conscience and his freedom of association.  It is not of primary moral importance that the socialist leftist may be right that discriminating against gay people and their marriages is wrong or that a woman has a right to have an abortion.  If these are fact as I think they are, this is still not justification for using force to violate the individual rights of the Christian fundamentalist.  Neither would it be right for the Christian fundamentalist to deny the government contract for domestic partnerships to gay people or to force those who do not share their religious beliefs to attend and financially support their church.

Our Declaration of Independence correctly identified the legitimate and very limited function of government.  Its legitimate functions are limited to the protection of the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It accomplishes this purpose by not allowing individuals to initiate the use of force upon others and by not itself using any more force than is needed to prevent individuals or aliens from initiating the use of force against its citizens.  Legitimate government is not in the business of doing harm to some in the name of a greater good claimed for others.  Legitimate government lives under a rule that it must first do no harm to anyone who has not initiated the use of force.  Legitimate government minimizes the use of force in a society, including its own use of force.  This is why the Constitution gave the federal government very limited and enumerated powers.  Those powers have been expanded by present-day interpretations far beyond the context of this very limited role of simply protecting individual rights.

Legitimate government rests on the foundation of a People who are mostly competent to comprehend their lives and environment, choose their own values, and pursue those values in a robust and choice-rich private sector.  It is in the private sector that individuals can best exercise their quest for knowledge and understanding, learn about the many values they might pursue, and exercise their choice of values by acquiring them, often in cooperation with others who wish to enter into trades of values with them.  No such enabling environment is possible in a society following a large government model.  The nature of laws and regulations that go beyond prohibiting the initiated use of force is to reduce choices of values and reduce their free trade.  Such a society suffers a reduction of knowledge, the reduction of the happiness of many, and a subsequent reduction in the production of goods and services.

The socialist elitist thinks it is crass to argue that their web of laws and regulations lead to a reduction in the growth of an economy.  They believe it is fine to impose these limits on human activity in pursuit of their moral ideals because trade and business are immoral, or at least not endeavors suitable to the most enlightened minds.  Never mind the fact that a free society with limited government whose private sector production of goods and services may easily grow at a 4% rate will provide 1.83 times as many goods and services in a generation (about 31 years in America) as one growing at a 2% rate characteristic of their partially enacted agenda under Obama.  They never consider how many of those with lesser abilities or drive will find it much easier to live and to enjoy a much more interesting life in a society with 83% more goods and services in a generation.  They never ask if the medical achievements, the development of new life-enhancing products, the advancement of knowledge generally and its teaching, the increased wealth available for charities, and the shortened work hours in such a more developed private sector might not easily be much preferable to the society with more public housing, free food, long term unemployment benefits, higher taxes, less investment, more corn subsidies, more Import-Export Bank subsidies, more renewable energy subsidies, more college loans, incalculably less pollution, and higher minimum wages now at the expense of this growth.

A moral society starts with a government that does not itself act immorally by using any more force than it must to keep individuals from using force unnecessarily.  A harmonious society starts with this minimization of the use of force.  It allows individuals to choose their own values, manage and own their own lives, and to trade freely with others for each trader's mutual advantage.  Such a society prospers in happiness and security.

Being happy is less about having a good or service than it is about being free to choose what you want and being able to act for the purpose of achieving your values.  The competent individual is capable of doing this.  The individual who is free to do this is more likely to feel competent.  This esteem that follows from the act of using one's own mind to understand reality, to identify and choose one's own values, and to act to achieve those values is essential to happiness.  Self-chosen values are the food of dreams and the freedom to act to achieve them is the basis for hope.  Good government does not kill our individual dreams and does not subvert our hopes.  It does not squash any individual's dreams and hopes in favor of a chosen group.  It provides equal freedoms for all to choose their values and to pursue them.

The man to vote for to become President is the man who best understands this and will try his best to reform government to make it legitimate.

Which Americans Disapprove of Despotic Presidential Actions?

As I frequently note, good government only results when Americans adhere to rational principles that define the purpose of legitimate, very limited government.  Those good American Principles are defined in the Declaration of Independence and mandated in the Constitution quite well, though those principles are no longer well-understood by most Americans.

Among the basic principles of good government is the principle that all Americans must obey legitimate laws.  This includes the President and the members of Congress.  Another very good principle is that the executive charged with executing the laws does not make the laws.  That function is very clearly and properly assigned to the legislature, our Congress.  The President's oath of office requires him to protect, preserve, and defend the Constitution and to faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress.

Obama repeatedly and habitually violates his oath of office, thumbs his nose at the Constitution and now at the Congress which is no longer entirely under his control.  He assures us that he can do anything he wishes to do and is entirely unconstrained by the Constitution.  As is the habit of convinced socialist leaders, he is sure the laws only apply to others and not to him.  He follows the path of many a socialist in assuming despotic powers over the people of his country.

What is the opinion of the People about this despot?  Well first off, the latest Rasmussen weekly poll says that 48% of the People overall approve of Obama's job as President.  Yet, when Fox News polled the People on what they thought of Obama's going around Congress and changing the laws by executive orders and with executive branch regulation changes based on exceedingly creative interpretations of laws in ways never imagined by the Congresses that passed those laws, 74% of the People disapproved of that very critical usurpation of powers.  Though 74% disapproved, many of them clearly fail to recognize how important it is to oppose such despotic acts, since 48% approve of his overall job performance.

Now it is popular among libertarians and Objectivists to claim that it does not matter a wit whether Republicans or Democrats control the government.  If this is true, then nearly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats ought to be opposed to presidential usurpation of powers not assigned to the office in the Constitution.  Yes, when a Democrat is President, slightly more Republicans will oppose such despotic acts and when a Republican is President, slightly more Democrats will oppose despotic presidential actions.

The Fox News poll found that 93% of Republicans opposed Obama's despotic acts, 80% of Independents opposed them, and only 54% of Democrats opposed them.  Very interestingly, when asked to set aside their beliefs in how our American government was supposed to work, the People overall no longer opposed presidential despotism by 74%, but that opposition fell to a mere 60%.  Clearly many Americans would rather not have their government limited by the Constitution and do not mind having a despotic ruler.

So, removed of the constraint of how they think the American government works, those who disapprove of a despotic presidential model among Republicans falls from 93% to 90%.  Independents disapproval falls 14% from 80% to only 66% disapproval.  Democrats show their general contempt for the Constitution and their love for despotism by dropping their disapproval from only 54% to a mere 31%, a drop of 23%!  The majority of Democrats just want to be told by a Supreme Leader what to do and they will do it.

To rephrase the attitude of most Democrats, if they could have their druthers, they would happily be slaves.  Most Democrats would do away with the Constitution.  Most Democrats are less than half as much inclined to oppose despotic rule as most Independents and only about one-third as likely to oppose it as Republicans.

Like it or not libertarians, the Republicans are Patriots with respect to the American Principle of government limited to the protection of individual rights compared to the Democrat traitors.
Many Republicans are highly flawed, but they are not despot lovers.  This is why far more libertarian voters are more aligned with the Republicans than with the Democrats.  This is why I usually vote for a Republican and never for a Democrat.  I am very strongly opposed to being a slave to any despot.

There are some very significant differences between Republicans and Democrats.

A Comment on the Constitution and its Role

I just left this comment on the Constitution and its legitimate role in a discussion in another blog:

Obama said he did not like the Constitution in a Chicago radio interview when he was a state Senator in Springfield, IL.  The reason: It did not allow the redistribution of income that he favored.  So of course, he and the other Democrat Socialists such as Justice Ginsburg, simply ignore the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence clearly states that the legitimate purpose of government is the protection of individual rights, broadly defined as to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The Preamble to the Constitution sets the terms of the contract the People have mandated that the government will observe, namely that the government will insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity.  It then enumerates a very few powers of government designed to make its sphere of influence small and that of the individual in the private sector much, much larger.

This is consistent with a government just big enough to defend us, but not big enough to use a great deal of force, as is the essential nature of government, to control our lives and deprive us of our liberties.  Government was small so the use of force and the fight over the power that represents would not divide the People and cause the destruction of the domestic tranquility.  The General Welfare then was understood to mean that government was to function so that everyone's welfare was promoted, not just that of a majority, or that of the poor, or that of the middle class.  Everyone's interest, which was mostly in their liberties, was to be promoted.  That understanding of the General Welfare has been horribly corrupted.

Maryland State Health Insurance Exchange is Inoperable

At 11:40 PM the Maryland State Health Insurance Exchange, sadly collaborating with the tyrannical ObamaCare mandate that individuals do not own their own bodies and minds, is unavailable.  It claims it has heavy traffic and that one should come back later.  Apparently, it have been so informing people all day.  Apparently, later is much later.  I wonder if anyone is actually able to use it at all.

It would be great if it never works, because we should all be allowed our individual right to either buy or not buy health insurance.  If we choose to buy it, we should be able to buy a plan with the coverage we want or at least those coverages freely offered by the market.  Government dictation is totally unacceptable.  Any government that interferes so fundamentally with our right to life is illegitimate and it is our duty to replace it.  See the Declaration of Independence.

A Nation of Sovereign Individuals with Unalienable Rights

Obama's 6 July radio address said that on 4 July 1776, a small band of men declared that we Americans were created equal and free to think and worship as we pleased.  He said we were now a land of liberty and opportunity.

Obama did not say in what very limited manner we were equal because his agenda requires that to be vague.  He did not note that while we are still free to think and worship as we please, we are very often not free to speak and write what we think or to act upon our beliefs, religious or not.  He did not note that our liberties are constantly becoming fewer and that he wants them to become fewer.  He did not say that he also wants to dictate the nature of our ever more limited opportunities and pick who will be given greater opportunity than others with manipulative government policies.  He habitually defends unequal status before government as an honest effort to create equality among the People.

To understand how insulting this man's ideas and policies are to the sovereign rights of the individual, we really need a much better understanding of what our individual rights are than most people have.  Indeed, even our founding fathers had an inadequate view of them, though I generally admire them for having understood the problem as well as they did in their time.

The Declaration of Independence, agreed upon on 2 July and published on 4 July 1776, wonderfully stated 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."

Yes, I do not agree that our rights come from our "Creator", but they do derive as Ayn Rand observed from our nature.  At that time, almost everyone assumed the nature of man had been determined by man's Creator and therefore the rights that derived from man's nature were endowed by man's Creator.  This reference to our Creator is a big deal with many who are religious today and because they attribute many of their beliefs to the will of a god they know nothing about, there are unfortunate consequences to this.  Despite this error, there are many really great insights in this quoted statement of the Declaration of Independence.

The statement firmly places sovereignty in the hands of the People, not with government.  It clearly takes individual rights to be of a very broad nature.  Note that it even implies rights beyond those of each individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their happiness with the word "among."  At the time, most Americans believed in the individual right to life, liberty, and property.  The substitution of pursuit of happiness for property was clearly a way of broadening the claim of individual rights.  Of course, the pursuit of happiness implied a freedom to acquire and keep property.  But, it also would imply such things as a freedom to choose one's own friends and domestic partners, to choose what books one would read, to choose a religion or not to choose one, to enter into trade with others of one's choosing for the purposes of one's choosing, to maintain the privacy one desires, and many more actions leading to any of the many means to and forms of happiness that individuals might choose.  This is a clear statement of a very broad concept of individual rights.

These rights are unalienable.  The existence of a government does not diminish these rights.  These rights are always sovereign in the individual.  These rights are not given to the individual by the government.  No, the government is only legitimate and able to claim a reason for its very existence to the extent that the government serves faithfully and well to protect these unalienable rights sovereign in the individual.  The government is the servant of individual rights and when it fails to protect them as a matter of principle, the sovereign individuals will reform and reorganize government by their right so that it does follow principles to protect their individual sovereign rights.

These are powerful, well-stated principles that are manifestly ignored and/or misunderstood by the Progressive Elitists who dominate most academic viewpoints on the role of government today.  This American principle of highly limited government with a legitimacy limited to its protection of individual rights held unalienably by sovereign individuals is unheard in academia, most media, and from most politicians.  The People, long educated in government-run and dominated schools, no longer have a clear concept of their sovereignty, of their broad rights, and of their equally unalienable claim to these rights.  Individuals are obviously unequal in most respects, but in the context of government, the most essential way in which they are equal is with respect to their equal and sovereign individual rights.  To give some people favored status by law is to abrogate this one critical respect in which we are equal before the law.  Those who most claim to believe in equality in the present political arena are most likely to destroy the most important sense in which we are equal.  For all of his talk promoting equality, the Progressive Elitist today believes in neither equal rights nor even one-man, one-vote.

The sovereignty of the individual is re-affirmed in the Preamble of the Constitution.  The statement of the highly limited powers of government issues from the sovereignty of the individuals who constitute that government.  The government is formed only to serve their needs by protecting their liberties and their general welfare.  This reference to general welfare is now often used in an out-of-context manner to support the welfare state and a massive redistribution of wealth.  This could not be further from the intention of the time.  No, then the general welfare implied government actions beneficial to everyone, not a bare majority or some special interest as it means today.  Securing individual rights would provide peace and tranquility, justice, and the general welfare for everyone.  No other government purpose can do this.  Other government actions will most likely be unjust to many, require threats of violence upon many, and will harm the interests of many.

The 9th Amendment of the Bill of Rights makes a clear statement that the rights of the individual are broad and are indeed unalienable.  They are not to be denied or disparaged by the government.  It is no small infraction of the principle of legitimate government that our government has long ignored this amendment and overtly claimed it to be meaningless.  Indeed, the Supreme Court has actually claimed that the government is sovereign, which it most manifestly is not.  Were this the case, then there would be no means by which a legitimate government could be formed and judged.  There would be no possible basis for overthrowing it when it became tyrannical and inimical to the rights of the individual.  Such a government would be inconsistent with both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Indeed, a sovereign government, rather than a government serving to protect the rights of sovereign individuals, is inconceivable in a human-centered morality in which individuals think and act as individuals for the purpose of preserving their lives, flourishing in liberty, and pursuing their own happiness.

This enlightenment and early American view of sovereign individual rights and very limited government legitimately protecting individual rights is very much at odds with the loose and hoary notions of government and rights held by Obama, the Progressive Elitists, and other advocates of big government today.  They assume that it is the purpose of government to grant individuals such rights as it may choose to give them.  They assume that government is supposed to hurt the interests of many for the purpose of helping some who are incompetent in living their lives.  They believe it is just and moral to propagate innumerable laws and regulations limiting our individual freedoms, even as each mandate is enforced by the threat of violence should anyone stand upon their individual rights.  No peace and tranquility are possible as faction upon faction, special interest upon special interest, and even race upon race, battle for control of the brutal power of government.  It is clear that by the criteria of our own Declaration of Independence, our government today is illegitimate.

The rational American does not celebrate the federal government on the 4th of July.  He celebrates the American Principle set forth by the Declaration of Independence and implemented in the Constitution by the mandate of American individuals.  The American Principle states that the individual is sovereign and each individual has equal and broad rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It states that the only legitimate purpose of government is the protection of the unalienable rights of the individual.  Due to this very limited function, government has and can claim but few powers.  The sovereign individual retains his sovereignty with respect to the freedom to exercise his rights, while government is entirely his servant devoted to the sole task of protecting the rights of each and every individual American.  By adherence to this dedicated purpose, good government harms no one and never initiates the use of force against anyone.