Need I point out what Rand would say, and I agree with? With respect to whose resources? Without private property there can be no personal liberty. I find collectivism in any form distressing, and I find majority rule to be very close to distressing, much like subjectivity because that is what majority rule is. Majority sets the morals, the standards? No. Majority creates reality? No!
When you feel that the only way you can survive is by other people’s handouts that you must point to some form of collectivism as “more efficient,” that presupposes that everyone is as helpless as you. They are not. I am not wealthy by any means, and scrounge for change every month to make ends meet. But I do not feel that because I am not Bill Gates doesn’t mean he–or anyone else–owes me anything.
The problem of collectivism is also in its enforcement; i.e.-a capitalist is not allowed in a collectivist society, but nothing is stopping collectivist groups from forming in a capitalist society. What, you afraid the churches are going to go out of business? What about volunteer soup kitchens (note volunteer)? To say that just because you can’t do something means someone else has to do it for you is a travesty of integrity.
Capitalists create men; collectivists create robots. If you don’t like Rand, read Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Wilson and Robert Shea. Two VERY different books that, miraculously, come to the same point:
only in the free market is man free.
Cough, cough. Perhaps you can leave aside your distressingly religious devotion to this philosophy to reread ponoqllads’ comments? There’s nothing in there about lack of private property etc. Game theoretical economic analysis is a section of modern (free market) economics. As such the efficient outcomes are in the context of pareto efficiency. In other words everyone is individually at least not-harmed and usually better off.
Snipping the rest of the fairly irrelevant rant against leninist collectivism, “majority rule” – as compared with elitist oligarchical rule? etc.
Free markets may or may not contain liberty. Certainly they provide the most efficient means of creating more wealth and when coupled with the right institutions may provide liberty but that is not a necessary condition. Of course, it strikes me that its easier to obtain and retain liberty when one has a modicum of surplus to devote to its maintainance, so I do believe there is a positive correlation, but again not a necessary one. A religious devotion to the concept that free market is political liberty is neither terribly scientific nor terribly “objective.”
I would suggest the objectivists should rather than study modern economics and perhaps also behavioural science rather philosophical assertions. To be clear, I’m not anti-free market (in fact I’m pro free markets as the best actually obtainable solution), nor even anti-individualist nor anything like that. Rather, I like to think I’m objective in the sense of basing my opinions on current best knowledge.
The assertions here ressemble religious dogma more than considered rational opinions based on scientific inquiry. Of course, that’s just my subjective opinion. Since I don’t know of any way to access unmediated reality, such as it is, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go with that.
So, the more massive the object, the less likely it will change state when not under observation? Tell that to jmullaney, who seems to believe that rocks stop being rocks when no one is looking at them, that there were no stars till there were people to look at them. (I think he’s trying to use the U. P. to prove there is a God, that He/She/It observed the universe into existence.)
Thanks for the re-fresher on Game Theory. My sole exposure to it is an article in Discover Magazine published many moons ago.
When I see something along the lines of “community’s resources” what would you have me think but collectivism of some sort? That term makes no sense in any other way. I would also like to quote “KbNN motivations led to strong ‘communities’ of somewhat weaker individuals,” and if this isn’t a description of collectivism I don’t know what is.
“Modern (free market) economics.” Free market being the word in parenthesis because we very much do not have a free market. Our economy is a mixture of freedom and controls…or, to put it more clearly, freedoms removed and freedoms not yet removed. But the government, at behest of majority rule, reserves the right to regulate the piss out of everything else, too. Perhaps you can explain how you equate this with liberty.
Elitist oligarchial rule? Eh? I never implied that at all. If you noted my reference to “Illuminatus” you might get the drift that my utopian society is anarcho-capitalistic. My realistic society, courtesy of Atlas Shrugged, is Democratic Capitalism, but without government interference in the economy. My nightmare society is this country, which has the most potential out of the whole world and yet keeps giving in to the communists, the socialists, and everyone else that comes down the pike except the people who provide stuff for the collectivists to steal in the first place.
I’m sorry if you feel my hatred toward mental and physical slavery borders on religious. It is nice to see you concede that your reality is subjective, as well, this time. But I will maintain that any study of economics that finds restrictions are necessary for the economy, and any free thinkers who perform better when their product is pooled in with the community’s and stripped away from the free-thinker him/erself, are not for me. If you find that I do not equate “community with weak individuals” with freedom, and that is not looking at it objectively, then I am truly more sorry than you imagine.
Do you see how a free market can exist without political liberty? I would be interested to see how you can chain the consumer and the producer legally but not economically. As well, I would wonder if the opposite is true, then, can you cahin people economically but not politically?
Anyway…
Money is power. A gun is power. The law will protect you from the gun, who will protect you from money? Decency and morality are, by the nature of thier instruction, at least some degree collective. There is no such thing as one monkey.
Capitalism is advantageous only in the sense that in tends to promote trade, which is advantageous to some degree, it provides access to resources that might otherwise be unavailable. But the game doesn’t work if anyone gets too much control, the threat to human well being is a collectively realized threat. If John Galt is a Jew, all the enlightened self-interest in the world ain’t gonna help if the world is run by Nazis, and thier collective sense of decency holds sway.
Enlighted self-interest can be a benign and reasonable stance if it takes place against a background of presumed, and yes , collective standards of decency. If I see you fall through the ice, should I (a) get you a rope or (b) check to see if you’re paying for my services with cash or credit?
Common decency is just that: held in common, a generally shared sense of value. History is a bloodstained witness to what happens when that ceases to be true.
Ayn Rand seemed to believe that those standards are not based on wholly rational grounds. She was right (well, DUH!, as Erasmus once remarked) She believed, no, preached that was sufficient reason to chuck them out altogether. It most emphaticly is not.
Uh, law is a gun, yeah? what do the cops point at you when you go against it? A gun symbolizes physical force. What is used against you when you break the law? What, in short, protects you from the law were the law to get out of hand?
Equating economic power with political power is a tough sell. Of course, now that our government regulates the economy, perhaps I can see why the two are so confused all the time.
I did not mean to imply in any way that resources were collectively owned and doled out. They were not. I put the word communities in quotes to denote that there was no actual framework for a community, but that certain sets of entities would wind up regularly interacting with each other.
In the simulations that I am refering to, there were certain abstract resources that individuals would need in certain amounts to remain “alive”. Resources could be aquired by entities from their distribution sources, or via trade with other entities.
There were many behavioral archetypes, reflecting how one entity would interact with another given their current resource totals and any knowledge they had of the other entity. Some archetypes were multi-modal, too, changing based upon past experience of the entity.
Then it sounds like game theory has actually strengthened my arguments. Not everyone is a John Galt, and so these kind but not naive communities would be far more common, with a few John Galt types shaking things up here and there.
This fits well with my thought, not sure if I’ve posted it here but others have, that rational self-interest does not create egotistical maniacs. The invisible hand and all of that.
Sorry for being more hostile toward you if any of my comments were. :o
You really should read some game theory.
Rational self-interest, if the standard models hold true to broader human interactions, lies in cooperative effort. Even in such simple models as the prisoner’s dilemna the most effective behavioral models are forgiving and initially trusting. In other words, valuing cooperative effort over “selfishness” is actually in the individual’s long-term self interest.
I am puzzled by your vitriolic condemnations of “collectivism”. Exactly what types of human relations are you groupiong under that term? Labor movements? Mutual defense pacts? Business partnerships? Public companies? Community centers? Sports teams? Churches? People cooperate in myriad ways under widely varied circumstances and “rules”. Is it collectivism only when a government is involved, or do you object to them all?
As to: “My realistic society, courtesy of Atlas Shrugged, is Democratic Capitalism, but without government interference in the economy.” The history of [relatively] unrestrained economies includes child labor, robber barons, predatory monopolies, human slavery, etc. Such activities have rarely, if ever, been brought to an end by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Instead, they have been ended withewr by regulatory intervention or extreme social upheaval.
Now, since I think all of the things I listed are undesirable, and I also think extreme social upheaval is undesirable, I prefer to live in a society which practices economic regulation designed to mitigate extreme abuses of the economically weak by the economically strong.
You certainly have the right to disagree. I wonder, though, is your position based upon an acceptance of either abuses such as those I listed or extreme social upheaval. Or is it based upon a dogmatic belief in the untested ability of the “invisible hand” to create utopia?
Well, kind of. There were far fewer John Galts than John Galt wannabes. Occasionally even a better-off John Galt would hit a short run of bad luck and wind up in bad straits, if not dead. The kind entities would usually wind up helping others out, and would often get helped out when they were having trouble surviving.
My criticism of the models that I’ve seen is that they are often good for modeling behavior within agrarian or even early industrial societies, but I haven’t really seen good models involving technological improvements that we see so often in today’s world. Then again, as I alluded to earlier, I haven’t really been keeping up in game theory for a while. It’s possible more modern models are able to take things like that into account.
You read your history as you see fit. How is selling a product to people robbing them? Can’t they just not buy it? Don’t pull necessity on me, because these barons you condemn got rich by providing a service that wasn’t there previously.
Child labor as opposed to child starvation? You read your history as you see fit.
Capitalism, requiring creative efforts, has a hard time using slaves to perform tasks. A technological capitalistic society can use them not at all.
Predatory monopolies? That’s a whole other post that I would be happy to address.
Read the operative word in your post, “cooperative.” As in, not coerced. As in, free to work together. As in, private individuals choosing together how to use their respective resources. Any government that regulated the economy does not allow free trade, it tolerates it only because it can’t wipe it out completely or face the poverty attached with communism. For a view of how the creative thinkers and professionsals view socialism, research England in the 60’s when socialism started popping out in many areas. To which economy did these people flee? To one where they could use their efforts as they saw fit: America. I don’t find it suprising, but the government did.
The example of churches is very astute. Yes, small collectivist organizations can exist in capitalism. Even large ones, I dare say. Where is the room for the capitalist in socialism? You tell me which is more “fair.”
Business partnerships are obviously voluntary.
The distinction, I hope, is clear. Each man, or group of men, deciding their own fate absolutely, not by a vote from some schmuck who has no idea how to use those talents and resources on his/her own.
I read history quite happily, thank you. One particular “service that wasn’t there previously,” that the robber barons often provided was protection from robber barons. Protection rackets have always been a lucrative economic prospect. I also note that your amusing dichotomy regarding child labor and starvation ignores the fact that massive child starvation was not the result when child labor was outlawed in either Britain or the United States.
This is a quite daring assertion. I have no idea how you plan to back it up, but please do provide support. Do please remember that not every task in a capitalistic society, even a technologically advanced capitalistic society, requires individual creativity. Untrained manual labor remains a significant component of our present economy. For that matter, the international sex trade has proven a very lucrative outlet for indentured servitude of a variety of forms.
As you please.
In some of the examples I posted, yes. In others, there might be legal, social or economic consequences which make the “choice” less than perfectly free. In some, the initial choice is free but carries with it an obligation to continue participation unless certain criteria are met.
My point is simply that the nature of human cooperative relationships (and yes, “cooperation” can be coerced) is broad. You seem determined to divide the world into two neat, clean categories. I was wondering how you drew the line. I still wonder.
Do contractual obligations hold even after an individual no longer wishes to be bound by them? What about implicit contracts and/or “social contracts”? Busniess relationships are not “obviously voluntary”. Business relationships can be coerced. Dissolving partnersips is not necessarily less impactive on an individual than relinquishing citizenship in a democratic body politic. The socialism against which you rail is, in one of its purest conceptual forms, simply a business relationship between workers.
I do not, and have not, advocated socialism, unless you inaccurately describe any governmental regulation of a market “socialism”.
I have stated that I would rather live in a society that acts to mitigate some of the possible extreme effects of free market economies.
Absolutely? You do indeed hope for a utopia. If more than one man is involved, no man has absolute freedom to determine his course. How do you think governments form in the first place?
Well, I’m glad you feel regulating business as a solution to a business crime is adequate. It’s nice to know that we have such varied opinions on the board. In one post, I found a similar stance on guns, in that guns are what kill people. Similarly, it is not an individual “robber baron” providing a “protection racket” that needs to be addressed, but the very act of business itself.
That’s a real no-nonsense approach. Ban the whole lot of them, I say. No need to screw around with freedoms when we can just point them in the right direction or else.
If you feel that a mixed economy is free, then I admire your capacity to ignore the obvious: once an economy is able to be regulated, there is no reason for people to stop regulating it. The end result of this is, as I say, socialism. Business requires freedom for long term planning. The less freedom, the less long term planning. The less long term planning, the more the government needs to step in end excersize more controls. For what end? Why, the same end that would have happened anyway: a more productive economy. Only one happens on its own, without wasting labor on non-productive areas like government.
I don’t doubt that the government has been doing a decent job at it, either; what I doubt is that its been worth the effort.
The government’s only tool is coercion. The businessman, while he may resort to coercion (much like the union workers you are so proud of) does not find it necessary to do so. One bad apple spoils the whole bunch? Too bad it doesn’t work the other way around.
I know how much people like to trade their freedom for security. I hate the way people want to trade MY freedom for security. It isn’t theirs to give away.
arl: I hate the way people want to trade MY freedom for security. It isn’t theirs to give away.
To the extent that “your” freedom is dependent on the security that other people have relinquished freedom for, yes it is. I love the way many libertarian types seem to think that everything they happen to be master of is solely due to God, nature, completely voluntary mutual exchanges, and/or their own sweet selves, but it’s just not true. The fact that you got paid for your work last month, that your money is still in the bank where you put it, that your possessions haven’t vanished and your drinking water hasn’t poisoned you and no bigger person has turned you out of your living quarters—all of that is at least a little bit due to the social structure you call an intolerable restriction on “your” freedom. Face it, we all live in what is to some extent a cooperative enterprise of mutual obligation, even though not a damn one of us ever officially signed up for it. There isn’t a society on earth where all the obligations are voluntarily assumed, so you can’t simply blame the US government.
Interesting interpretation of my words. I offered no specific solutions. If I had, I might have said, “making protection rackets illegal” would be a good starting place. Of course, that is a restriction on the free economic market. But without it, there is no governmental avenue for addressing the “individual robber baron”. Though, since you object to all governmental coercion I suppose you feel the peasants should simply take up arms to solve their problem. As I mentioned before, such social upheavals are art of the historical pattern.
I see three options:
- find someplace in my post where I suggested “banning teh lot” of any group.
- tone down your rhetoric and respond to what I actually write.
- demonstrate a continuing preference for spouting dismissive rhetoric rather than actually discussing ideas.
The obvious historical precedent is that regulated economies have rarely resulted in socialist states. Another obvious truth is that in many particulars the United States has “stopped regulating” portions of its economy. I suspect that the inevitable decline into socialism which you posit is more the product of fervent belief than studied analysis.
No. Business requires stability for long-term planning. Business requires freedom to take full advantage of the planning that stability enables.
It is not correct that the interests of business and government in a productive economy are identical, the words of Charles Wilson notwithstanding. Nor is it true that government controls are enacted as a direct consequence of failures in corporate planning. Nor is it true that an unfettered economy would necessarily result in better or more accurate corporate planning.
If, however, you feel that you can demonstrate that those statements are true, please do.
No. The governement has many tools at its disposal to change the behaviors of its citizens. It has, in fact, every tool that business has plus the ability to pass laws. The “Invisible hand” that you seem so fond of is also a coersive force, by the way. It is, in fact, an anthropomorphic label applied to the complex structures of coersive economic influences which will hypothetically guide the behavior of the participants in a free market to a utopian society.
- You are again projecting your prejudice onto my posts. I have expressed neither pride nor disgust of union workers.
- A business will resort to coercion under exactly the same circumstances that a government will: when the decision makers feel coercion is necessary/beneficial to their aims. This is, of course, exactly what one would expect, since both businesses and governments are human institutions.
Were you strong enough to ensure your freedom as a self-sufficient individual, no one could trade it away from you. Since you evidently are not, your freedom is meaningful only to the extent that others will agree to protect and honor it. That consent is indeed theirs to give away.
Some fairly wise men a couple of centuries ago understood this and explicitely guaranteed that the coersive power of government would not be used to attack certain freedoms in this country.
I can’t say that I’m 100% up to date on this, but it strikes me that recent literature in game theory has been fairly well applied to modern markets – but it gets beyond the simpler games of course. Frankly I have a hard time wading through some of it. If I was a few hundred miles closer to home I’d try to share a cite or two.
Spiritus:
Randlover’s devotion to strawmen arguments and over the top rhetoric seems to be unbounded. (Look at how he responded to P’s note on Game Theory) Frankly, his or her devotion to an extreme position reads as religious dogma to me. Not sure its even worth the effort.
Instead I will offer you this to make my fevered religious stance as clear as possible. I am not implying anyone has said these things here.
Business cannot regulate itself, being made up of men.
~A democracy can regulate itself, being made up of men.
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Safety cannot be guaranteed without controls on personal liberty because individuals will do what they want.
~Controls cannot be guaranteed to be safe because the individuals who create them are human, and cannot regulate themselves, by the same definition.
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A democratic government can regulate itself through the will of the people.
~This democratic government found it necessary to forcibly draft individuals to fight a war not declared or supported by the will of the people.
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People would not support each other without government welfare.
~This means that a majority opinion was formed to do something the majority does not want to do.
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The minority of poor persons need government aide.
~The smallest minority is the individual, as this posting clearly states by the way I am ostracized, even before I began attacking people. Anything that acts against one men acts against all men. To give poor people money or food it must be taken from someone else, namely someone who disagrees. If they agreed, it would not be necessary to take it; the item would have already been offered.
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The government is basically benign and beneficial because it has all the powers a corporation has, plus more.
~Unregulated Business are bad because they have too much power.
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The government is basically benign and beneficial because it has all the powers a corporation has, plus more. The government currently has a part in: banking, farming, roadbuilding, imports and exports, broadcasting, transportation, air travel, protection, national defense, the stock market, foriegn relations, etc etc etc, and we rely on the government of men to regulate itself through laws.
~Businesses of men cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. That gives them too much power. (I hope the contrast of power is clear here, and why I find it absurd that we trust one and not the other)
Economic power and Physical Power are both powers that can be used to coerce and should be controlled, at least partially, by the government and not be in the hands of the people but…
~Voting power is stronger than either and should be in the hands of the people (?!?!)
>>>I don’t agree that physical and economic powers are equal, just heard people equate them before.
If you feel that I am taking a religious view of my topics, it is because all I see are contradictions in arguments against me, whether made by people in this post or not. I do not feel man is an incompetent undisciplined creature who needs to be guided around and led by the hand. The government has done wonderful things; private industry unregulated may not have achieved some of the feats that government has; this in no way removes the contradiction or proves the case against me, whatever that case may be (besides being fanatical 
)
Contradiction is not a fact of life. You would find it very unsettling if you parked in your driveway and got a ticket for not paying for a non-existent parking meter. And yet in the anti-trust laws we find businesses are being treated with the equivalent of that. I do not expect you to believe me. Try reading just one little portion of “Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal” by the scoffed Rand, and there is a portion where all the cites and court cases you could dream of are, describing the nature of the anti-trust laws and some of the cases that have been brought against corporations.
I don’t expect the world of free market capitalism to be a utopian society where everyone is happy and loving and things work great. I also don’t expect it to be a dark, poisonous place where people fight each other for pennies tossed carelessly to them by fat-cat industrial barons. I don’t even find it will be 100% more efficient than everything we have now. Anything requiring cooperative effort will surely become a bit more strenuous. But I do believe it will be an infinitely wiser society, because everyone knows that what they own they own, and no one else can come and take it away from them for any reason. The only way to survive in a society like this is through honesty. In today’s society, the more ability a person has the more that person is regulated and chained by the government. Ability is punished, though desirable.
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[battens down the hatches and prepares for another assault]
What an inteesting response. It seems to me that much of my last massage could be paraphrased, “please respond to what I post not whatever arguments you have heard before and think that I am making.”
You respond with a catalog of arguments that I have not made.
Why?
Is this some kind of Gaultian redux of “taking your ball and going home?”
You’re mixing up ideas here. Foggy thinking leads to foggier conclusions.
What do you mean by regulate itself in regards to a business? If you mean in terms of pursuing its own interests, of course it should be able to, else it goes under. However, in relationship to pareto optimal solutions, no. That’s in part what game theory is about, to explain how externalities might be dealt with. Really, this is not anything outside of free market analysis. If you’d leave aside an out-of-date and overly simplistic classical model and look into modern economic theory.
I was going to comment on the rest until I noted you’ve simply set up a bunch of straw man arguments. Really this is very silly.
Ah, yes, the oppressed “objectivist”.
Though I do think some of the points I brought up were relevant to what both you and I and Collun. and I were discussing in general, now that I’ve calmed down a bit I’ll be happy to try and work this out. No, I’m not taking my ball and going home, haha.
By outlawing something considered to be immoral, such as initiation of force you are not limiting free trade. I don’t think we are in disagreement that initiating force is wrong. A protection racket, however, is amusingly similar to the police force (just an aside, food for thought). The tax we pay (some) goes to funding policing agencies. However, I don’t think every person agrees with all laws, and indeed if you start getting a little uppity about your disagreements who comes after you? And, as well, if you don’t pay these fees, who comes after you? That’s a pretection racket in itself. Anyway, I guess I should start out that a basic right of man is to be able to exist free from coercion; or, equivilantly, no man has the right to initiate force against others. A protection racket, “pay me or else,” is not uncommon from a mode of government in itself. We just feel bettr because it isn’t a private protection racket.
What I did, then, was overstate your position, but not mistake it. Remember, as well, that though you might not feel this way, rest assured there are those who do and in the eyes of the government, you would be on their side favoring more controls. The persons with mild opinions on the matter get spoken for by the one’s with extreme positions on the matter. As is what happens with me being grouped with libertarians and they being grouped with me. It is not completely correct, but not entirely uncalled for either. For matters political, in the end we cannot sit on the fence because a law is a law and it splits things in two.
This is not obvious because a flourishing economy with all members having a voicible opinion is a relatively modern affair. Besides, Capitalism is a prett recent affair, as well, and you’ll note that every economy has become socialistic partially. Europe is a perfect example of this. Here in America as well are many socialistic reforms successfully passed (though some never do make it).
Stopped regulating one area to move to another? I’m gonna remain on my stance, regulation is increasing overall even if other regulations are being abolished.
And if you remove that freedom, what good is stability?
If I said that then I agree that I am wrong, it is not a sufficient condition for better corporate planning.
I feel I covered this adequately enough in my last less ranting post.
Yes. {{curses self}} :o
Negative. No way I can accept that people generally find it ok to use force for personal gain. even the government I have issues with rarely does this. But, even if that were true, then we have accomplished nothing by regulating business except make it illegal for the individual to do what the government can do. Another contradiction I didn’t put in my last post. Self defense, say, we delegate to the government for a police force and a military, but that doesn’t imply an individual cannot still defend himself, yeah? We can not give the government any “rights” that we do not have ourselves since it is a government of men. Similarly, we cannot have the government with powers we restrict ourselves to have. This would be absurd. For law to make sense, mind you, my point is that a government of men must treat its citizens as it would have the citizens treat each other. To do otherwise belies what another of my points are: in a controlled society, and freedoms which are not restricted are merely tolerated, not supported. Let me elaborate on this further with…
Come on, mob rule? Man has the ability to do many things if we ignore morality and such. Rights are restrictions on a man’s freedom which are eployed to exemplify the nature of man himself, to aid in focusing the qualities that seperate not only species from species but inividual from individual. Rights on a personal level are morality. It is our “right” to live free from coercion; aka, humans are restricted from initiating the use of force; aka it is immoral to use force to get others to do what you want. This can merely be an understood agreement between two individuals. When we apply it to a large scale we need a government to turn it to law and to enforce it; i.e.-to ensure it is applied consistently in human relationships. So the government becomes an enforcer of morality, see? It is the keeper of rights. Because of this, anything the government does should be moral and this is where we hear people cry today, "I have a right to earn a living.* Uh, sorry, no you don’t. You have a right to try to earn a living. But the government has created a socialistic welfare institution and thus, as the keeper of morailty, has inadvertently made it a moral commandment that people do actually have the right to earn a living. NOW, the welfare state, or even a welfare program, must take money from people who have it and give it to those who do not. This is not voluntary. Now the government has made a brand of theivery moral as well, when it is in the Robin Hood sense. There can be no general concept allowing stealing, only specifics which aid one group at the expense of another. It is good to take from the rich to give to the poor but it is not good to take for any other reason. Note I am not saying “Kill poor people,” but that the end effect is “We have a right to expropriate wealth from persons better of than we are.” Once it is let into law, it becomes morality, and morals drive the people that drive the state that…et cetera.
Freedom of speech does not guarantee you won’t be tried in a civil suit for libel. The right for citizens to bear arms shall not be infringed does not guarantee that a gun ban won’t take place to stop citizens from bearing arms. I dare say our constitution has so many holes in it now that I’m suprised the Supreme Court has a leg to stand on. The third amendment seems pretty safe for now. Unreasonable search and seizure? I suppose pulling a car over for speeding then searching it isn’t unreasonable…after all, if they were speeding they must be doing something more.
the fifth amendment has a really interesting line in it, “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” Now, what was I saying about mob rule? Did it disappear or has it merely become moral now? Sixth amendment seems ok. Same for 7 and 8. Take a look at nine.
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Things are getting trickier now, aren’t they? Because those rights not reserved by the people and not stated in the constitution fall to the states and the government power over us extends to multiple fronts. this does work both ways, of course. But it is still a very interesting amendment indeed.
I hope this is better for you?