That’s not within the scope of this thread. The Constitution has failed as a device to protect personal liberty. I’ve proven that. I’m not obligated to go any further than that.
Dude, that’s horseshit. You don’t get to say you’ve “proven” something because you made a bunch of unsupported assertions.
Tell that to the conscripts who were killed or maimed in battle fighting a war for the egomaniacal whims of the particular president in power.
Ok then dispute my assertions. Do i get to keep the fruits of my labor? If so tell me why I am wrong. Am i not required to register for the draft? If i am not, tell me why I am wrong. Etc.
All anyone else has done is give reasons *why *my liberty is curtailed. Nobody has disputed that they are indeed curtailed.
:rolleyes: Clearly Hamilton was not talking about “danger” to the militiamen/soldiers.
Of course you are, re-read the OP; you are obliged to show the FFs would agree with you about that, and would agree besides that the U.S. Constitution as they drafted it was a bad idea.
You have failed to prove that those liberties are guaranteed by the Constitution. Therefore there is no burden on us to defend their loss.
Yes, you get to keep the fruits of your labor. Do you get paid? QED. I really don’t understand what your complaint is here. Are you upset that you can’t make your own crystal meth? What?
Yes, you’re required to register for the draft. I fail to see how this in any way curtails your liberty, other than for the eight seconds it takes to fill out the Selective Service form.
Really? What federal regulations are you required to follow to set up a fruit stand? In what sense are any of those regulations curtailing your liberty?
What’s unreasonable about them?
Possibly, but none of that monitoring could be used against you in a trial.
Yes, you could. Now show me a state- any state- where you’d have received due process before soldiers were allowed to kill you in a time of war.
Your contention is presumably that your liberty is unreasonably curtailed - so it makes perfect sense for people to point out the reasons. If you are complaining that your liberty is curtailed, period, when you should be free and unfettered and allowed to do whatever the fuck you possibly want, then complaining about the Constitution is kind of pointless. No document other than one which required the killing of every other human being could possibly guarantee you that kind of freedom.
No you don’t. Yes you are.
Your error is not in stating these obvious truths, but in categorizing them as personal liberties the constitution - or any free state - is obligated to protect.
Every government has taxes. The US constitution has required a census from the very beginning - why is that less onerous than registering for the draft? The census is not curtailing your personal liberties, is it? Or, at least, if you are personally all butthurt about it, you would agree that the founding fathers weren’t, wouldn’t you?
No system of government ever conceived can protect you from a bad government. It simply cannot work that way. The constitution as promised (?) doesn’t prevent the scenario you described. You’re sitting there complaining, and you might as well say that the constitution doesn’t protect you from being struck by lightning. It doesn’t, because it can’t.
A Hitler, a Pol Pot, a Napoleon, a Caesar could happen here. The constitution goes a fair way to making that difficult, but it doesn’t make it impossible, and nothing, ever, truly can.
Your specific complaint strikes me as pointless.
(Your other complaints, while I do not agree with them, did not strike me as pointless, so I left 'em alone.)
Would they see mass shootings as a price worth paying for an armed populace? When the Second Amendment was written the single-shot firearms of the time couldn’t have pulled it off, so I doubt firearms misuse even came into their minds. Franklin has that famous quote that “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” so I don’t think they’d change a thing.
I assumed that was the inference.
I was asking what use(s) of the power of the federal government have justified secession?
CMC
Here is my take on the question of secession and why it led to a war:
When the people of the Arkansas Territory voted for state hood, did the territorial governor show up in DC and declare “We’re a state now!” Seems to me that congress had to enact some sort of admission process. So, since admission is not a unilateral action, neither would secession be.
Secession is valid and viable in the context of the constitution, but once you proffer your letter of secession, the congress must consider it, and if they chuse to reject it, you are stuck. The South believed that secession was a direct right that they could exercise at will, without consideration for how the United States might feel about it and then cried when the North started shooting at them.
I read it as “they force me to pay taxes”. Then I stopped paying attention to whatever else **WillFarnaby **might have to say, for obvious reasons.
I read it that way too, but even the most ardent libertarian doesn’t think taxation should be optional… right?
Depends on which definition of “libertarian” you use. At the far end of the spectrum are various anarcho-capitalists and zero-government advocates who would would have no compulsory law at all.
Even short of the far end of the spectrum, an awful lot of “only slightly woo” libertarians believe that government should only raise funds by purely voluntary means.
Also, a few accept the idea of government levying fines for very overt misbehavior. If somebody shoots up a school, they can be fined; most of this goes to restitution for the victims, but the government can rake off a little. Or, for instance, judges would be paid by taking a small percentage of the settlements they arrange. This leads to market competition. (“Hi, I’m Judge Sam! I charge less than all the other judges in town!”) These are the libertarians who believe that government can be run like a business – preferably a small one – and would be subject to all the market forces than any other business is.
(I think it’s blindingly insane, but there are a blortload of people who argue for it.)
Yes. That is, you get paid money; and then you spend it, on food, on housing, and on government; you taxes are just one more item on your personal budget.
The idea that the Founding Fathers would agree with modern libertarians is pretty silly. There’s nothing in anything they said or wrote to support this. There is a valid argument to be made that some of the founding fathers might have envisioned a system of thirteen separate governments instead of one central government doing things like collecting taxes and enforcing laws but there’s no evidence they were trying to set up whatever kind of stateless system exists in the libertarian imagination.
Gun, code, God, country - Stultus fidelis.
‘Ridicule is the only weapon that can be used against unintelligible propositions’. -Thomas Jefferson