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Posts Tagged → coercive

US Supreme Court tells us what we already know, and ignores the obvious

If the rule of law requires both mutual consent and contention between America’s three branches of government, our modern inclination to simply look to an authority to tell us what to do, what we may do, is a sign that Americans have grown tired of the hard work of running a republic.

The US Supreme Court has little authority but what moral authority it can muster through reasoning based on our Constitution. Yet increasingly, the court is used as a policy center to impose laws that otherwise failed in Congress.

This week the court held – gasp – that prayer is allowed in government meetings. Never mind that America’s founding fathers prayed together before working on governance. Never mind that for at least 200 years, Congress convened in prayer before convening in policy. In chambers. Never mind that our federal and most state founding documents recognize God, not government, as the source of human rights. In other words, Americans have been invoking and praying to God as part of official duties since our founding. There’s nothing new here. There’s nothing to question.

If it was done then, then yes, it can (and should) be done now.

Today’s general legal wranglings involve questions that ought not even be asked. But because there’s a group of people at war with America’s culture, institutions, and Constitution, these questions get asked as if they’re serious, legitimate, worthy. They’re none of those. But they serve the Left’s purpose of advancing an anti American agenda.

The Court also declined to hear a contested New Jersey law prohibiting the carrying (“bearing”) of handguns in public without proof of necessity. The Second Amendment means what it says, the court has held twice that it means an individual right, and since our founding Americans have, like prayer in government, been carrying guns in public.

There’s nothing new here except the liberals in NJ, whose war against America goes unchecked.

Here’s the thing: Laws are only as good as the potential to force their adherence by threats of force, incarceration, fines etc. It’s one of the great ironies of the pacifist Left that they enjoy, nay, require, the full coercive force of government to achieve their policy goals.

But citizens can disobey. And citizens can challenge authority. Will the Left feel bad for jailed gun-bearing conservatives, or government leaders invoking God before sitting down to business, as the Left felt bad for civil rights protestors once  jailed by anti- black police and politicians?

Don’t count on it. Logic, consistency are not hallmarks of the Left. But we can overcome, nonetheless.

Curious things afoot in our American republic

Some time ago, actually not too long by the measure of human history, Communists, Capitalists, and Fascists fought each other in the streets of Weimar Germany.

Each fought for what they believed in. What the Fascists and the Communists believed in was equal amounts of totalitarian evil, served up slightly differently. Only the capitalists had a track record, and it was a successful one that had led Germany to a place of such prominence and financial success that human nature and poor judgment had then sought to use those riches for imperial gain and human subjugation.

Weimar Germany was bad for every German. What naturally followed on its heels – Nazi Germany’s National Socialism – was bad for the entire world.

Capitalism creates such great wealth, across such a large number of people, that like bees to honey, the evil inclination of human nature is drawn to it with bad intentions.

Politicians of all stripes cannot keep their hands off of the private money created through capitalism. Whether it’s high taxes to fund government grants to preferred political allies, or outright confiscation/ theft and wealth redistribution, politicians always seek to appropriate capitalist success for their own careers and their own ends.

Yesterday I had the unfortunate experience of watching New York City’s new mayor, Bill deBlasio, get sworn in. De Blasio is a kook, a radical whose communist views are well known. No one can predict for certain what will befall the Big Apple after one term of his management, but it probably won’t be pleasant to watch from Pennsylvania (he is first-off aiming to end the handsome cab business, where tourists get pulled around in horse-drawn carriages in Central Park). And my New York friends will probably suffer significant losses to their home values, businesses, and other investments they have made in the area. Wealth would naturally flee de Blasio’s presence.

One cannot help but be intrigued by the similarity between Weimar Germany’s otherwise unremarkable circumstances, and those America is sliding into today: High unemployment, sliding currency value, inflation, and increasingly hot friction wherever mutually exclusive political interests collide.

Human history repeats itself so often that it’s both kind of silly to even suggest that America will become another Weimar Germany, and it is also silly to blow it off and pretend it isn’t happening.

De Blasio has his sights set on other people’s private wealth, and he is likely to lose a great number of wealthy people from NYC as a result. What is more worrisome is the friction that will arise and ripple out as he presses forward and is met with the natural resistance reasonable people expect to greet thievery.

“Income inequality” is his byword, and it’s just another way of saying he’s going to steal from the makers and give to lazy takers, using the coercive power of government force and threat of loss of liberty for dissenters. Other politicians are watching de Blasio, and they have already signaled their inclinations to follow his lead in their local venues.

It is difficult to imagine a more explosive arrangement or set of circumstances. Once again, one is reminded of either the 19-teens and 1920s, or even the 1850s in America. Such incompatible political philosophies are afoot, banging into one another, and one must win, and one must lose.

I hope de Blasio loses. I hope. To think otherwise is to be against the very American republic that first created the wealth he is now after.