Thoughts on the incremental nature of the destruction of liberty. Unfortunately, it’s like a ratchet, and it’s a lot harder to get rid of bad laws than to create new ones.
32 thoughts on ““I Want My Sudafed!””
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Thoughts on the incremental nature of the destruction of liberty. Unfortunately, it’s like a ratchet, and it’s a lot harder to get rid of bad laws than to create new ones.
Comments are closed.
I can relate to this – I use Pseudoephedrine on a regular basis, handing over my ID every time at the Walgreens, and I always wonder if this will be the purchase that earns me a visit from the po po…
I’ve long suspected that one legislative branches should only be allowed to initiate bills which strike text from the existing US Code and/or CFR. (I’d allow size-reducing refactoring too if I could ever think of a non-loophole-filled way to do so.) If most voters aren’t smart enough to elect non-meddling politicians, at least we can turn the meddling to better use. Given a few decades of pruning it might actually become possible for people to have read all the rules they’re expected to follow.
In my fantasy Constitution I see the Senate and House replaced with a House of Law and a House of Liberty. The latter can repeal or constrict laws without consent of the former. The former can pass no law without review and chance of challenge by the latter.
Sadly Peter, that is already their job. We are so far removed from the founding fathers now that these concepts are foreign to them.
I had a cold a few months ago, and looking at the box labels, decided there wasn’t much difference between the over-the-counter stuff and a placebo. I guess that’s what passes for “progress” these days.
The simplest thing would be to stipulate that no law enacted by any Congress can remain in effect for more than a year after its succeeding Congress convenes.
Period. The subsequent Congress can’t even pass a resolution extending it — the law must be revisited in its entirety and go through the whole process as a brand-new legislative act. And that includes statutory authority to the Executive Branch for its regulatory power.
Eventually even a full-time Congress would run out of time to pass new laws without letting old ones expire. Win-win!
My ideal constitution:
All Budgets must be ballanced.
Requires super majority to pass any law.
Requires a simple majority of either congress or state legislatures to repeal any law.
The ancient Icelandic parliament had an official called the Lawgiver. His job was to memorize all the laws and recite them once a year. If he forgot something, it was no longer a valid law.
I’d love to see somebody — maybe Pelosi — try to recite the Obamacare law from memory.
1000 A4 pages in Times New Roman 12-point.
Any new legislation just starts cropping at the start unless the new bill explicitly states which laws are being cropped, reworked etc.
Robotically generated True/False quizzes (100 sentences picked by pure randomness directly from the text, 50 of which are adjusted by the addition of the word “not” in a syntactically correct location) administered on CSPAN and archived on YouTube.
Gross but effective, http://www.neilmed.com/usa/sinusrinse.php
How do you solve a problem like meth?
The local learning supply stores are supposed to report people buying large quantities of test tubes especially if the people buying them have dirty hands.
I question the ratchet argument. Were our laws better in 1950? In 1850?
I say no.
How do you solve a problem like meth?
As long as producers make a profit you can’t which leads to two solutions.
1) Have the government give it away for free (a really bad idea.)
2) Immediately give all users a one way ticket to elsewhere and enforce it.
Prison does not work for this.
btw, choice two is self financing. You start with all the people currently in prison for any crime other than murder that are also meth addicts. You release them from prison, remove their citizenship if they are one, and then deport them. You’ve just replaced the cost of one prison inmate with a ticket to elsewhere.
This does require we secure our borders which is something the government should absolutely do before anything else. We don’t need a separate border patrol, our military and coast guard should be tasked with the job.
“You release them from prison, remove their citizenship if they are one, and then deport them.”
To where, exactly? I doubt Canada would welcome them with open arms. Not to mention, I’m not a fan of the government being able to strip a person of their citizenship willy nilly. Today it’s meth, maybe tomorrow it’s buying private healthcare.
You can’t “solve” meth; you can only treat it as the public health issue it is, like Portugal does.
I question the ratchet argument. Were our laws better in 1950? In 1850?
I say no.
I’d say yes … especially for 1850 since the feds wouldn’t even have considered this … nor would have the states.
Yea … I want the store tracking my purchases … Gotta love this logic … They don’t want the gov’t to track your purchases rather they want the gov’t to make the businesses track your purchases!
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Two state lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday to establish a statewide, industry-funded electronic tracking system for purchases of cold and allergy medicine containing an ingredient in methamphetamine.
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Under the legislation, pharmacists could track purchases of the medicine electronically, so that they could refuse a sale that exceeds a customer’s legal limit. The bill would make Tennessee the 13th state to require this e-tracking syste
http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/legislation-would-allow-tracking-drug-found-cold-medicine
LoboSolo, seriously? Remember that in 1850 we had slavery, and women couldn’t vote.
LoboSolo, seriously? Remember that in 1850 we had slavery, and women couldn’t vote.
It’s a conceit of the Progressive Left mindset that we “moderns” or “post-moderns” or whatever we are to be called this week, are inherently superior to those in the past. Because, well, they’re in the past and we aren’t.
But just wait. In a few hundred years, i believe that historians will come down just has hard on the flaws and faults of our society, our lost opportunities and the general mess we are making of things.
It’s not that we are superior. It’s that later generations have had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of previous ones. I still say that on the whole, the US laws of 2010 are better than those of 1850 or 1950.
It depends on what you mean by “on the whole.” Clearly there have been a few federal laws passed (e.g., ending slavery, giving women the vote) that have had a huge positive result. But the vast majority of federal laws, particularly the “progressive” ones, passed in the last sixty and hundred sixty years have made things worse (e.g., much of the New Deal and Great Society, which put many blacks back on a different kind of plantation), and in many cases they deal with issues that shouldn’t be federal at all.
People who want their freedom back, probably don’t want slavery back also. There are a few nuts out there, but most aren’t them.
There is also no reason why a light regulatory environment and chattel slavery are somehow inextricably intertwined, except in the left’s mind by way of historical coincidence.
It’s not that we are superior. It’s that later generations have had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of previous ones. I still say that on the whole, the US laws of 2010 are better than those of 1850 or 1950.
What’s going to happen in a few decades? For example, we have indentured servants (H1-B visas). We have apparently are building a class of people with debt that they can’t pay off nor discharge via bankruptcy (large student loans). We have ethnic groups which society legally discriminates against (“white people”). And we have an increasingly powerful and intrusive central government with no analogy in the US until one gets to the days of the old British empire. We have the seeds planted to reverse the gains of the past couple of centuries.
PS – you could also desire more independence from the giant sucking vortex of Washington without wanting to whitewash the confederacy and what it stood for.
Right now we are seriously in danger of having every single aspect of our civic life, culture, and independent wealth sucked into federally controlled institutions. Not wanting that has nothing to do with racism.
“Clearly there have been a few federal laws passed (e.g., ending slavery, giving women the vote) that have had a huge positive result.”
How is society better because women can vote? What improvements have we achieved that we would not have with women not voting?
Recall that women consistently vote in higher percentages for larger government and more handouts than men do. Has the Family Court system (with men being forcibly separated from their children, but forced to provide for ex-wives) better for women voting? Is MADD a net benefit to society? Would we have failed to pass the Clean Air Act or defeat Nazi Germany if women couldn’t vote?
Brock:
Taxation without representation is contrary to liberty. Consider the widow. She is taxed, but without women’s suffrage she has no say in how her taxes are spent. Likewise the single woman.
You might argue that the married woman deserves no vote because her husband will perfectly defend her wishes. To this special case I say that first, I do not believe the husband will always be a good agent for his wife, and second, that having a special category of voting rights for married women is an impractical expedient.
That’s a pretty weak argument, Will. If the right to influence where your tax money goes is the basis for the franchise, then what do we do with the half or so of citizens over 18 who don’t pay any Federal tax? Why do they get the right to vote and, say, a hard-working immigrant with a green card or 17-year-old with a summer job not get the right to vote? I suggest if this is the underlying philosophy, it’s grotesquely unequally applied.
I don’t know – it’s a pretty good one to me. Why should anyone who does pay taxes not get to vote? That was one of our original complaints against Britain – conscription for their wars, heavy taxation to keep colonial industry under their thumb, and less than full citizenship – no say in their decisions.
Why do people who don’t pay taxes get to vote? It would certainly be a decent check on DeTouqueville’s failure mode if they couldn’t vote, until they started doing so. That way, you could have a generous social safety net without it becoming a cancer. The people who pay for it would decide when enough is enough.
Aaron, I meant it’s a weak argument for why the system we have exists. Personally, I would be very happy to have a “no representation without taxation” system. Indeed, I’d put back poll taxes, literacy tests, any any other attempt to weed out fools and the lazy from casting a precious vote.
I think it was Confucious who said ” to rule a man by law alone, renders him void of shame.” Governments are messing up bigtime, passing new laws to correct the errors they have made in the in the previous ones to the point now that we cannot wake up without breaking a law or two. Across the world Governments are abusing the mandate given to them by the people and then taxing us to pay for their ineptitude. But peope are not the ignorant, uneducated, illterate masses any longer. The www has raised the bar. The uprising in Egypt and Tunisia has highlighted that the people have had enough. It is most important now that we keep up the momentum by demanding transparency and freedom and that we will no longer tolerate bad governance.
Carl:
Even the adult citizens who don’t pay Federal Income Tax pay substantial taxes to the Federal Government.
I don’t think so, Will. In the first place, they may not be working, but instead receiving SS or state disability. In the second, the Federal income tax becomes negative at the lower end, welfare, so the Feds are paying you. Finally, if you are referring to FICA/Medicare taxes, you overlook the fact that people on the lower side of the income get all that money and more back when they retire, so over a lifetime it’s hardly what you’d call a “tax.”
I’m not a fan of the government being able to strip a person of their citizenship willy nilly.
Neither am I. However, I’ve seen first hand the lifetime destruction caused by some drugs where prison is the wrong solution and most everything else is worse.
To where, exactly?
I don’t care is not quite accurate but close to my mood. International waters with a map of uninhabited islands works for me. Save some of that prison concrete for making a ‘liberty ship.’ Send them on their way with 30 days of supplies (unlimited fresh water by solar still) and the knowledge that returning to American territorial waters means we sink the ship.