Publius

There are three types of operative clauses in the Bill of Rights. 1) Individual right – an unambiguous, unqualified right of the people 2) Individual civil right – a specification of process intended to protect individuals from government abuse of power 3) individual administrative right - Here are the first ten Amendments (sans 2 nd Amendment) and identification of each type of right next to the operative clause. Amendment I (1791) Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (individual right) , or prohibiting the free exercise thereof (individual right) ; or abridging the freedom of speech (individual right) , or of the press (individual right) ; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble (individual right) , and to petition the government for a redress of grievances (individual right) . (Amendment II, see below) Amendment III (1791) No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner (individual...

This whole ObamaCare episode is incredibly evocative of the final chapters of Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, as the country is falling apart, there is chaos and confusion on the part of the pro-totalitarian-government forces and their acolytes. Some admit the whole purpose of the exercise was to gain power for themsel ves, and they don't really care if the nation falls apart to get it. Some are terrified and confused. And some (the "Leader" Thompson in the book) don't know what to do - and that's why they arrest John Galt and try to make him an Economic Dictator - under the premise that he can force all the terrible laws they've been passing to somehow achieve good result. John Galt refused to go along with this charade, knowing that the whole root of the collapse was people using force to replace the choices of others with their own: Galt: "If you order me to issue a directive, I will issue the directive you order me to issue." Thompson: "Oh, bu...

Liberty is our birthright - our nature - our requirement for survival. In the dawn of time Man was born into Liberty. In the State of Nature, man is free. He must seek, then create, the means of his survival - his food, his shelter. It is not given to him, it is not automatic. In the State of Nature, a man alone keeps what he makes through the use of his own reason. Then man invented Society and Government - and every government from the beginning of time until the founding of the United States was based not on Liberty, but on Force and Coercion. Every Government from the beginning of time has ended after injustice, torture, enslavement and death of its own people, followed by conquest, murder and enslavement from outside. This is because we chose Government of expediency - government of tradition - government of the jungle - government of force. We chose a Government in contradiction with our need for Individual Liberty. But at the founding of the United States, for perhaps the first ...

Donna Brazile tweets that she cannot understand why her health insurance premiums just went up. Only someone guilty of gross mental and moral evasion could ask this. Donna Brazile , conservatives and libertarians have spent the last two years explaining to morons like you why the price of health insurance was going to skyrocket under Obamacare. It's not that you're too stupid to understand. It's that you *evaded* the truth, you willfully put blinders on. It's time for people like you to get out of the way. Your "rule by feelings" is sending this nation over the cliff. http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/02/27/Donna-Brazile-Why-did-my-health-care-premiums-go-up

Law may properly intervene only where one's actions harm another person, without their voluntary consent. Government is not about any particular morality. It should be about banning force in human relationships so that all individuals may operate under whatever moral choices they think best. Almost all choices are moral because almost all choices affect our long-term lives, happiness and survival in some way.  By guaranteeing each person the freedom to pursue their own goals in any way they want (absent force) we will evolve as a society much more quickly than if a thug or gang forces everyone to live according to their particular choices - because we will see more quickly what works and what doesn't. And more fundamentally, we will live as *men* with our minds - instead of as animals do, by brute force. Our experiment in freedom has devolved into two rival gangs constantly vying to control government's power in order to restrict the freedom of choice of others. Those of u...

Science is a process, not a result. It is in particular a process of epistemology - it's a means of obtaining and verifying knowledge. Anyone who is wed to a theory as opposed to the facts is not a scientist. I've been watching Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and there is a great episode about Johannes Kepler. You see, Kepler's original theory was that the planets travel around the sun in perfect circles nested in perfect solids nested in other perfect circles and so on. Kepler spent many long, frustrating years trying to match his theory to the data, but he couldn't make it work. At one point, he decided the data he had on hand was flawed, so he sought out Tycho Brahe who had the best data on the motions of the planets. Even with Brahe's excellent data, Kepler couldn't make his theory work. So at long last, he gave up his theory. And in doing so, he was able to make a great scientific achievement - the first laws of planetary motion. You see, the planets tr...

In 2011, I calculate the overall US murder rate as 4.6 per 100,000 population. But if you recalculate this, and assumed that black men murdered at the same rate as everyone else, the overall rate would drop to 1.9 out of 100,000 population. That would give the United States the 147th highest murder rate in the world - or, the 60th best. The insane disproportionate murder rate among US blacks is why the overall US murder rate seems so high. I don't understand why liberals refuse to talk about this. I don't understand why blacks refuse to talk about this. Blacks are just as often the victim as the offender - almost SIXTY PERCENT of murder victims in the US are black. Shouldn't they care about this? Where are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to talk about this? Yet they are silent. And it's not like this is any secret. This culture of violence, abuse of women, and plain thuggery is paraded around daily in pop music. It's glorified on TV shows like "...

Seriously. I shit you not. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/be-ready-to-mint-that-coin/ The bill above is from a period of Yugoslavian hyperinflation in 1993-1994. But Paul Krugman is arguing Obama can "sidestep" the debt ceiling negotiation by simply printing a trillion dollars. It's nice that Krugman hasn't given up his childhood belief in magic. But in the real world of grown-ups, such thinking is dangerous.

Federal Spending has increased by $1 Trillion a year since Obama took office. These are big, absurd numbers that bear no relation to most people's daily lives. So let's put it into perspective. $1 Trillion, is a million millions. There are 300 million people in the US. Only about half of those, 155 million, are employed. One trillion divided by 155 million (i.e., each working person's share of the increased government spending) is $6,451. Per year, per working person. So if you are a typical family with two wage earners, your family's share of just the *increase* in Federal spending since Obama took office is $12,903. Per year. But the total Federal budget is actually $3.7 Trillion. Your family's share of the total Federal Budget is $47,741. Per year. Now let's take a look at soaking the rich. (You know you want to.) In 2011, about 6 million Americans made more than $200,000 in income that year. (1) Let's make them pay for everything! Ho...

So, the socialists love British socialized health care and the British ban on guns. So let's see what that means in reality eh? In 2010: UK: 157275 cancer deaths UK cancer death rate: .2489% US: 569490 cancer deaths US cancer death rate: .1844% The US has a dramatically lower death rate from cancer, because the US (somewhat) private health care system does a better job of treating, managing, and curing cancer than does the British system. If the UK had America's superior cancer death rate, that is 40,734 more Britons who would have survived 2010. That's a 0.06% rate of death by socialized medicine. Compare to the roughly 16,000 Americans who were murdered by a firearm - a 0.005% chance. So, the British are 10 times more likely to die of socialized medicine, than an American is of a gunshot. http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@nho/documents/document/acspc-024113.pdf http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/mortality/uk-cancer-mortal...

Megan, you overlooked one obvious thing that could help.  More regular, sane, well-adjusted people who are well trained in the use of firearms should be allowed to carry them concealed, in public. The reason the shooters pick malls, schools, restaurants and the like is that they know noone in any of these places will offer them any resistance. Because we have in our "wisdom" banned guns from these places - even by non-crazies. So when crazy shows up to a school there is *no way to stop it*. The meme is "Noone has ever committed a mass murder at a gun show." But it's truth. These shooters are, fundamentally, cowards. They want easy victims, and as you say, a sense of power. So they're going to go to places where we have banned guns and know they will get to exercise that power without resistance. Places that might resist won't give them the sense of power. The obvious solution you overlook, is to encourage, educate, and allow more people to defend thems...

Whoa. Occasionally we get through to people, even if only partially: "This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire." @Nicholas D Kristof, this is because you leftists have had poverty wrong all along. Poverty is the state of nature. In our nation, poverty is not victimhood. Poverty is not a state you are kept in by a feudal lord. Poverty is, merely, the lack of wealth-producing and wealth-building activity. To create and build wealth, certain values are required: industriousness, foresight, independence, integrity, honesty, the ability to consider the values of other so that you can deal with them by trade, and above all: rationality, the ability to solve problems, because solving problems is what creates value. All humans are born into poverty. We are all born with n...

A Colorado Republican argued against open immigration by saying "America is a nation of immigrants AND a nation of laws. We are a sovereign nation with a right to control our borders." My response: "We are a nation of laws AND a nation of street-crossers! Of course we like and appreciate street-crossers, we're all where we are because our forebears crossed a street!" "But we need some regulation of this street-crossing or all would be chaos!" "So, here, fill out these 25 forms. You don't understand them? Don't worry, if you make a mistake we'll let you know but you will have to go back to the end of the line. Oh, yes, you can hire a few attorneys to help you. And, we don't want chaos, so we only allow 10,000 people a year to cross the street. We expect your wait to only be five to ten years. But after that, we will be happy to allow you to cross the street! You say your house burned down and you're trying ...

The moral decay of our once great nation is not about parties. It arises from the fantasy that we can eliminate all risk from life. While eliminating risk is what everyone wants to do, and what everyone works to do, it has its limits. We can save, and invest - but the bank could fold, the business could bankrupt, the jar of gold coins could be stolen. These failures can be because of bad luck, or bad choices. We can go to school to try to learn the right things, we can buy insurance, we can be careful about what we hedge and what we risk. But all life is risk - every single day you might trip, have a heart attack, be hit by a bus, get robbed at gunpoint and shot dead. You cannot plan all risk out of life, and trying to do so causes us to commit grave injustices against others and to make everyone profoundly unhappy. The only truly risk-free life would be, disembodied brains, encased in layers of steel and concrete, somehow fed by a source similarly protected from the outside - p...

I don't normally do photos on here. But I had to.

To do big things, you need big money and a lot of people. There are fundamentally only two ways to accumulate big money and a lot of people: voluntarily, or involuntarily. In the voluntary column, you have say Apple. It has accumulated some $80 Billion now through the efforts of its tens of thousands of employees, investors, and executives. It uses that money to invest in great new technology. Big innovations often require big money. Apple spends tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, and the efforts of thousands of people to bring new products to market. It has earned all the money to do that, through voluntary, mutually beneficial relationships. In the involuntary column, when the pharoahs built the pyramids, it was done by slaves, under the whip, worked to death with no choice in the matter. Both "big" projects (the iPad, and the Pyramid) required lots of money and lots of people. But one was voluntary, the other involuntary. One was created throu...

With all of the little neo-hippies on Wall Street (and the President) bashing "greedy corporations", holding signs that say "A corporation is not a person", perhaps we should take a little detour from our political path to discuss what, precisely, is a corporation? Indeed, a corporation is not "a person". That is obvious to even dullards such as the Occupy Wall Street crowd. A corporation is a nexus of a number of people organized around a common goal. It is a type of social organization that provides incredible benefits to civilization. Corporations align the interests of: owners/shareholders/investors workers customers Of course, the purpose of a corporation is to produce a profit for its owners. There, I said it. PROFIT. Profit is not evil, profit is not "exploitation". Profit is a goal of all rational, productive activity. Without profit, you are toiling in order to live hand to mouth, on a day to day basis. To profit is to pr...

The purpose of government is to protect our rights, our individual liberty. Yet Barack Obama has turned our government into a tool to destroy the very concepts of individuals, rights, and morality. Wall Street Bailout - companies that recklessly gambled with financial instruments they didn't understand, were rewarded with hundreds of billions of dollars of bailouts. Banks that were responsible and did not have problems, were forced to take government money and be subjected to government control anyway, and paid a price for bailout money that they didn't need. States bailout - left-wing states such as California and Illinois which boast large welfare apparatus and progressive taxation, are the hardest-hit by the recession because their tax structures are set up to punish the wealthy, and in a recession the wealthiest are the ones who get hit the hardest. In California, the powerful public employees unions have engineered outrageous pensions and salary increases, while around the...

The illustrious John Kerry, loser in the 2004 Presidential election, is one of the leftists who constantly proclaim bromides such as "the rich are getting richer", "the rich should pay their fair share", etc. Kerry is among the most liberal of Senators, and any time a question of tax cuts versus tax increases comes up, Kerry has always voted for tax increases. Yet, he is harboring his new $7M yacht (guardian of the proletariat that he is) in Rhode Island - in order to dodge massive taxes on such property in Taxachusetts, er, Massachusetts. Kerry's dodge will save him nearly $500,000 plus $70,000 a year in taxes on the yacht. http://wbztv.com/local/john.kerry.yacht.2.1825558.html Kerry's comment: "I have nothing more to say." It's a good thing that Kerry is fighting for the common man - by raising taxes on the most evil segment of our society, diabetics and disabled people, against whom he voted to sock an excise tax on medi...

If you have been following the JournoList scandal, you know that emails leaked from the list show that leftist journalists such as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post among others, collaborated among other things on how to tackle certain issues in articles and best attack their Republican opponents. The response of these leftist wonks to these revelations have been more revelatory, perhaps, than the actual emails. They are saying "Well what's more natural than a bunch of us 'progressives' hanging out on an internet forum?" And from my side, of COURSE these people are all hardcore leftists. That's what we've been saying for 30 years, that the press is almost completely leftist. The point is that journalism schools, and these people, have been defending themselves for decades by claiming that they are following all these standards for objective reporting. And now we learn that in fact, they are working together to damage real debate by throwing around unfounde...