Republic Or Democracy?

I read a news story down here in Florida today about a local teacher who insists that students should not be taught that America is a democracy, emphasizing that America is a republic. The school board agreed to use the term "representative democracy," but the teacher remains unperturbed and continues arguing that the word "republic" is the most accurate.

The news story dripped with disdain for this woman and portrayed her as obsessed with mere semantics. But America needs a lot more people like her, for the distinction between a republic and a democracy (representative or otherwise) is crucial to America's identity and survival.

The founders scorned democracy as the untrammeled will of the mob, whose passions always lead it to abuse power and destroy prosperity. A "representative democracy" suffers from this same defect; the will of the mob is simply funneled through a few ciphers and remains free to rape, pillage, and plunder however the mob demands.

Contrast this to a republic, where the rule of law places limits on what the mob may accomplish no matter how fervent or unanimous the desire. A representative democracy knows no limits to governmental power, but a republic is founded precisely on the notion that there are things the government cannot ever do. The extinction of that notion is what has destroyed the republican nature of America and guarantees rough seas ahead, for the rule of law has yielded to the rule of men. Thank goodness there's a woman with enough sense and courage to challenge it.

It's Christmas

When we celebrate the birth of someone who, though destitute and carried about by a donkey, possessed a greater nobility than Julius Caesar. Whether you believe in Jesus as historical figure or the son of God, the message he brought is a profound one that cannot be overlooked. Those who came before taught that man's nobility lay within the world by subduing earthly foes and preserving bodily purity. Jesus taught that nobility requires moving beyond the world rather than wallowing in it, fixing one's gaze upward to the ideal and eternal rather than the pragmatic or actual. A blunt way of summarizing the message is that Earth is a ghetto and the body a prison. People who measure their lives solely by their achievements here are poor in spirit, mundane, and trapped. The rich in spirit are in the world but not of it, and nothing of the world can harm them. Understanding this makes all of life's petty torments evaporate, and that is the true gift of Christmas.

Human Rights -- Part IV

The International Covenant On Economic, Social, And Cultural Rights

Simultaneous with the re-packaging of the UDHR’s First Generation Rights into the ICCPR in 1966, the U.N. General Assembly also re-packaged the UDHR’s Second Generation Rights into the International Covenant On Economic, Social, And Cultural Rights (“ICESCR”), thus elevating interventionist, welfare-state ideology into the status of another legally binding regime. Similar to the ICCPR, the ICESCR entered into force only ten years after its creation when the requisite number of nations ratified it. President Jimmy Carter signed the ICESCR in 1979, but the Senate has never given its advice and consent, so the treaty remains unratified by the United States to this day. And as usual this offers little comfort – Carter’s signature by itself binds the United States not to defeat the “object and purpose” of the ICESCR, meaning that any serious effort to roll back unlawful government programs domestically will meet with much gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts from the “human rights” community.

As discussed previously with regard to the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, the Second Generation Rights re-appearing in the ICESCR have nothing to do with individual freedom and everything to do with governmental activism such as the redistribution of wealth and the reordering of private relationships. So we see once again the statism originally advocated by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948:

Article 6(2) commands that governments expend taxpayers’ money to supply vocational training, an objective that at best belongs to the political realm, certainly not the moral or legal realms that the ICESCR purports to represent.

Article 7 commands private employers to provide specific levels of pay, promotion and vacation time, objectives that a genuinely free society would allow employers and employees to work out amongst themselves however they wish. Even if some nations dislike individual freedom and choose to enact this type of legislation, they have the sovereign power to do so – just as other nations should have the sovereign power not to.

Article 9 proclaims a universal “right” to social insurance, meaning that some citizens are now entitled to receive wealth from other citizens. Such redistributions are objectionable enough when they amount to optional public policy, but by making this type of policy mandatory the ICESCR again slips into moral perversion.

Article 10(2) mandates paid leave for childbearing mothers, another noble objective, but one that cannot be achieved by official diktat unless we admit once and for all that private citizens may not frame their contractual relationships as they choose.

Article 11 again mandates an “adequate” standard of living, something that tends to occur much more frequently in those societies where government does not presume to control private economic activity (i.e., the pursuit of happiness). Ironically, standards of living tend to suffer most in societies where governments micromanage the “production, conservation, and distribution of food” as counseled in Article 11(2).

Article 13 reiterates the UDHR’s call for “free” (i.e., taxpayer-financed) education that will inculcate children with attitudes, opinions, and behaviors friendly to the United Nations and its works. Lest any parents seek to school their children in an institution other than a government mill, Article 13(4) still commands that such institution deliver the pre-approved set of teachings.

Unlike its cousin the ICCPR, the ICESCR does not create a new bureaucracy charged with monitoring “human rights” abuses. Instead, that task falls to a separate United Nations entity – the Committee On Economic, Social, And Cultural Rights – which receives occasional reports from member nations and which issues commentary on how to advance the ICESCR’s goals. According to this Committee, “compulsory old-age insurance” is a human-rights imperative to be imposed by “national law,” meaning that any government declining to re-shuffle its citizens’ wealth is deemed guilty of a human-rights violation. The Committee also decrees that private employers may not decide for themselves whether to hire and fire as they see fit, even when a potential employee’s mental or physical health is unstable. With regard to equality between men and women, the Committee sweeps away the limited-government tradition of treating everybody as equal before the law, demanding rather that government drop all neutrality and actively force equality of conditions (the full scope of which remains entirely undefined). Finally (and all too predictably), the Committee seeks to graft these beliefs onto the minds of children, declaring that nations must “monitor” educational content to ensure that it advances the ICESCR’s objectives.

The ICESCR would be laughable but for the fact that its proponents take it seriously, and these proponents find it intolerable that the welfare state has not (quite) achieved the status of holy writ. Exemplifying this mindset is the late Robert Drinan – acclaimed priest, Georgetown University law professor, and U.S. Congressman – who eulogized the ICESCR as “an amazing document.” In awe of the interventionist philosophy of this document, Drinan scorned the United States’ hesitation as a threat “to the potential of the U.N. committee that supervises the [ICESCR’s] implementation.” We can only hope.

On Citizens United

I am sick of hearing people complain about the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and even sicker knowing that an amendment effort is underway to attack it. For the unacquainted, many are irate that the Supreme Court struck down a law limiting the ability of corporations to engage in political speech, especially because the Court treated corporations as "persons" endowed with rights under the First Amendment.

Such anger confirms the abject ignorance enveloping the modern American mind. Let me count the ways.

First, there's a serious issue of reading comprehension. The First Amendment says the following as to speech: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." Nothing in this language identifies or constrains where the speech must come from, whether it's an individual, a corporation, or even a parrot. The origin of the speech is irrelevant; if it qualifies as speech, it is protected, period.

Second, the issue is not one of rights and who possesses them, but rather of powers and who wields them. The federal government wields only those powers listed in the sparse words of the main Constitution; our obsession with the First Amendment and the entire Bill of Rights is misplaced, for these are redundancies that the anti-federalists insisted on adding as a mere "exclamation point" on the federal government's most prominent and natural limitations. In laymen's terms, the federal government has no enumerated power to regulate speech by individuals, corporations, or parrots, and thus it may not do so. Debating over whether a corporation qualifies as a "person" is thus doubly unnecessary: it has no bearing on the plain language of the First Amendment, which in turn has no bearing on the federal government's inability to regulate speech at all. By thinking of rights as parsimonious grants from the first ten amendments we do ourselves a tremendous disservice, and we give the federal government more power than it warrants. (Note that State governments are free to regulate speech according to the plain language of the First Amendment and the structure of the Constitution as well, but I'll save that for a future post.)

Third, why are people so afraid of political speech all of a sudden? They gleefully support corporations' ability to promulgate dreck in the form of novels, music, television, and movies, all of which eat away at the fabric of society far more than campaign ads might. It is safe to say that Eat, Pray, Love has done 100 times more to destroy American life than Hillary: The Movie. It seems free speech is acceptable so long as it comprises insipid and gratifying entertainment; speech about politics, though, crosses the line (which is ironic when recalling the primary goal of the First Amendment was to protect political speech).

Fourth, I can't help but notice that most of the people upset with Citizens United are leftists, the same people who champion the notion of "collective rights" and read the Second Amendment in an ahistorical vacuum to repose the right to bear arms in the very government the framers feared might abuse them. All such cant over collective rights mysteriously evanesces when a corporation enters the picture.

Fifth, if corporations or similar entities are indeed stripped of their legal personhood, then bully for them! No more criminal charges or fines, no more being sued for aggravated hangnails, and no more being blamed for gross negligence or similar mental states that might trigger punitive damages. If only humans have the capacity for speech, then surely only humans have the capacity for malice aforethought.

Random Thought

Environmentalists portray humanity as an existential threat to the planet, yet they insist on keeping the planet as hospitable for humans as possible.

More Annoyances

Fighter jets flying over a football stadium immediately before the game. It confirms the Roman bread-and-circuses nature of the entire affair.

Seven hundred channels to choose from, but nothing worth watching except Transformers re-runs.

What passes for witty conversation today.

When an opposing attorney completely ignores the argument I made in a motion and simply re-asserts what he has said a hundred times before. It makes the reply easier, but it's still mind-boggling.

Men who act as though the highest goal of life is to impress women.

Having to say my name three times before somebody understands it.

People who send a rapid succession of incoherent text messages rather than a single coherent message, especially when I'm trying to respond but have to pause each time to check the latest one.

Whenever someone decides to park right next to my car even though there are plenty of open spaces to choose from.

Any native speaker of a foreign language who takes a high-school or college class for that language just to score an easy "A."

People who look in one direction but begin walking in another, directly into me.

Drivers who don't signal. Even worse are the drivers who signal after already having changed lanes; if you're going to drive badly, at least have the courage to stick to your guns.

Reading a news story about some unfortunate and deadly accident that was nobody's fault, but knowing that a lawsuit will be filed before the funeral.

People who spell "free rein" as "free reign" or say "could care less" when meaning "couldn't care less." Even worse are the people who defend these errors when informed of them.

Americans who think that we must sacrifice liberty to preserve either safety or economic prosperity, failing to grasp that America was founded on the notion that liberty is far more important than either of those objectives.

Human Rights -- Part III

The International Covenant On Civil And Political Rights

In 1966 the U.N. General Assembly spliced the traditional, First Generation Rights from the UDHR and re-packaged them as an independent treaty that would achieve binding legal effect whenever a sufficient number of nations ratified it: The International Covenant On Civil Political Rights (“ICCPR”). That moment arrived in 1977, when the ICCPR entered into force, and the United States itself ratified the ICCPR in 1992.

This warrants extreme concern because the U.S. Supreme Court, in the tragic ruling of Missouri v. Holland, has held that international treaties may override the Tenth Amendment of our Constitution and expand the scope of federal power while diminishing the presumptive authority of the States – even though such treaties are not constitutional amendments. A true amendment would require supermajorities in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the States; a treaty transfiguring the Constitution under the Holland decision, on the other hand, requires only a supermajority of the Senate. Precious little comfort is found in the fact that the United States declared that the ICCPR is “non-self-executing” and requires domestic legislation to take full effect, as the elites in our courts and our universities labor to make the ICCPR’s language directly enforceable against us. For example, one typical scholar has argued that the ICCPR’s non-self-executing status applies only to private lawsuits, not to the ICCPR in general, and therefore the full treaty should bind the United States despite the absence of enabling legislation. Another example of this revolt occurred in 2000, when the Supreme Court was hearing a challenge to the Violence Against Women Act on the basis that the Act exceeded the federal government’s powers over private citizens. A group of self-styled “international legal scholars and human rights experts” filed a brief citing Missouri v. Holland and urging the Supreme Court to apply the ICCPR to expand federal power beyond what the Constitution permits. As detailed in my previous book, the Court thankfully struck down the challenged portion of the Act because “[t]he regulation and punishment of intrastate violence that is not directed at . . . interstate commerce has always been the province of the States.” In more recent years, however, the Court has gone the other way and indeed made use of the ICCPR to re-write the Constitution, such as when Justice Anthony Kennedy cited the ICCPR to decree that States may no longer carry out the death penalty against persons who committed their capital crimes when under the age of eighteen.

Anyone familiar with American history will recognize that these initial steps, however popular their immediate impact may be, blaze a trail for future incursions into local (now national) sovereignty. A review of some ICCPR provisions demonstrates the cause for alarm:

Nowhere does the ICCPR mention the right to own property, even though that right is commemorated in Article 17 of the UDHR. So the ICCPR not only re-packages the UDHR, but it also abridges it by excluding a right that secures so many others. There can be no true freedom of speech, freedom of association, or freedom of religion if the material means for engaging in them are not likewise securely owned by private individuals, whether it be printing presses, computers, homes, books, or houses of worship. In short, the ICCPR’s omission of private property alone renders the ICCPR a farce.

Article 4 of the ICCPR likewise drains many of the mentioned rights of their meaning, as it authorizes governments to repeal or “derogate” those rights “[i]n time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation . . . .” This vague, expansive exception truncates such rights as the freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention (Article 9); the right to be treated humanely and with dignity upon any arrest or detention (Article 10); the right to leave one’s country (Article 12); the presumption of innocence until proven guilty (Article 14); the right not to testify against oneself (Article 14); the right not to be prosecuted for the same offense more than once (Article 14); the right to preserve one’s privacy and home from arbitrary interference (Article 17); the basic right to hold opinions (Article 19); the right of peaceful assembly (Article 21); the right of association (Article 22); and the right to marry (Article 23). Our Constitution contains no such “exception clause” allowing the federal government to ignore its inherent limitations, so the ICCPR offers the federal government legalistic cover whenever it may indulge in unconstitutional repression.

Article 20 curtails our rights rather than protects them, specifically the right to free speech. “Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law. . . . Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.” Once again, our Constitution does not allow the federal government to regulate speech, a prerogative left to the several States. Of course this has not stopped the federal government from unlawfully doing so on many occasions, and the ICCPR simply throws gasoline on that fire.

Article 25 decrees that voting for public officials is an inherent and universal right, one that cannot be placed under “unreasonable” restrictions or denied, except perhaps during an “emergency” as described in Article 4. This directly contradicts our Constitution. For example, Article II, Section 1 allows States to choose presidential electors however they wish, whether it’s by a coin toss or popular suffrage. Moreover, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment allows States to revoke the franchise from criminals, which several States still do. There is no telling whether the ICCPR’s stewards on the Human Rights Committee (see below) would regard this as “reasonable” or not, but there is also no basis for letting them decide. Logic and experience demonstrate that voting is a privilege, not a right, and the ICCPR effectively overrides political experimentation with this privilege. A nation seeking to preserve modest, limited government has a very good rationale for imposing modest, limited suffrage. The ICCPR opens the floodgates to unrestrained mobocracy that allows citizens to plunder each other.

Article 26 drops all pretense of moderation and calls for the outlawing of any discrimination, by anyone against anyone else, and for any reason. This laughably authoritarian language sweeps so far that it could conceivably prohibit gender-specific bathrooms. Even if such silly applications were avoided, the fact remains that free people can choose to associate or not to associate for any reason they wish, even if for reasons widely viewed as objectionable. As with so many other Articles, this one hands the federal government a power it utterly lacks, since nothing in the Constitution authorizes federal interference into private choices of this nature. While the federal government has twisted the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause to achieve these forbidden objectives, Article 26 provides yet more legalistic cover for this brand of unlawful government activity.

Articles 28-41 offer the coup de grâce: a “Human Rights Committee” that investigates and chastises member nations who shirk their duty to configure their citizens’ rights to the ICCPR’s vision. Even though the Committee is a creation of the ICCPR – an independent treaty – it is wholly financed by the United Nations, which also oversees the election of the Committee members. The Committee often hears from disgruntled groups such as the Center for Reproductive Rights, which in 2006 complained to the Committee that the United States is bound by the ICCPR to do more to help women obtain contraception and/or to terminate unwanted pregnancies (as if the United States did not already excel at those endeavors). In response to these kinds of complaints, the Committee has issued a growing body of decisions that, while not directly enforceable, are treated by the legal community as authoritative “jurisprudence” on the duties of all nations towards their own citizens. According to the Committee, for example, abortion is a “human right” (for the mother, not for the human fetus obviously). The Committee urges the federal government to place a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty, which the federal government lacks the constitutional authority to do. Additionally, the Committee feels that a local government within a federal system may not outlaw homosexual conduct. On the flip side, however, the Committee feels that someone should not be permitted to doubt or deny the Holocaust openly, as freedom of expression apparently does not extend to unpopular or ridiculous opinions (i.e., the very ones in need of protection, and which are best addressed by more speech rather than less). Reasonable people may differ on how to handle all these challenges, but the Human Rights Committee and the ICCPR regime it represents leave no room for debate, smearing those who disagree as enemies of humanity. “Jurisprudence” of this sort will continue to mushroom as leftists the world over clamor to ratchet moral and decisional authority beyond the reach of their countrymen.

A Picture Worth A Million Words

The scene so perfectly captures the soul of modern people as they coolly step around a dying man to pursue their hearts' desire, and after a day of thanksgiving, no less. No treatise describing the new Dark Age descending upon us will ever find enough words to match this.

I Laughed

This article I just stumbled on about modern female pop stars is wrong, wrong, wrong . . . but oh so right. [Warning: strong language]

The Disruptive Nature Of Moral Excellence

I posted not long ago on a young football player who demonstrated so much skill that the rules were changed to prohibit him from scoring too much, a classic illustration of how excellence angers rather than inspires. That was a question of physical excellence, but it is moral excellence that will truly cause people to hate you.

A person of moral excellence is a walking, talking rebuke to all those who are immoral or lack morals (amoral). The mere fact of his existence inflames, since the contrast between him and everyone else is too stark to ignore and cannot be forgiven. A standard reaction is to mock, berate, or otherwise tear down the paragon of virtue in order to prove that nobody is better than anyone else, making the lowest common denominator feel good and even superior for being free of priggish pretensions.

Witness the rage at Tim Tebow for being a man of faith who walks the walk rather than just talks. Witness any number of movies or television shows that portray the morally upright as naïve, repressed, disturbed, or even malevolent. Witness the modern love affair with sarcasm, which is insincerity most often aimed at a human target perceived as too big for his britches.

I recently heard a story about a young woman in high school whose friends mercilessly mocked her for staying a virgin until married. One day she sat them all down and asked that they cut it out, reminding them of the following: at any time I can choose to be like you, but you can never again choose to be like me. Amen, sister.

Human Rights -- Part II

I've been remiss in making my installments concerning human rights, an important subject I raised last month when discussing how the OWS movement and similar idealists should exercise caution in wielding language that the political class has usurped. If the goal is to challenge the political class, a rush to embrace "human rights" as officially defined is self-defeating.

The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights

With much bombast and ceremony did the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 grant unanimous approval to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“UDHR”), the first international “human rights” instrument ever. Eleanor Roosevelt had led the commission charged with the Declaration’s drafting, which was no accident: her devotion to the New Deal agenda of her late husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, would ensure that the document bore his ideological footprint.

Amidst all the hoopla, however, problems were already surfacing because the various U.N. members could not fully agree on what constitutes a human right, and thus the UDHR lacked the momentum to become a treaty and carried no binding legal effect. On the one hand, the UDHR proclaimed noble ideals such as freedom of expression (Article 19) and private property (Article 17), which are often labeled as “First Generation Rights.” On the other hand, certain controversial Articles sketched out “rights” that do not inhere in the individual but rather call upon governments to coerce certain behaviors or to redistribute wealth and toil from one segment of the population to the other – commonly known as slavery, but euphemistically labeled as “Second Generation Rights.” Some examples of these Second Generation Rights are as follows:

UDHR Article 23 announces, among other things, that “[e]veryone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment”; “[e]veryone, without discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work”; and “[e]veryone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.” Apart from the Article’s vagueness – an open invitation to governmental abuse – the only way to secure these kinds of “rights” is to force employers to provide them, which destroys the employers’ own right to conduct their affairs as they see fit. So the employment relationship that was once a voluntary, contractual arrangement now yields to a coerced association. These are not rights. At best, they are optional political programs; at worst, they are sheer wrongs.

UDHR Article 24 again invades the workplace by decreeing that “[e]veryone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” If I own a business and offer a job with long working hours and unpaid vacations, I may be insensitive, but the potential employee is free to accept or reject that offer. Both of us are engaged in the pursuit of happiness, and neither of us may force his wishes onto the other. I cannot force him to work for me, and he cannot force me to employ him. That is how free men associate, a concept so basic and yet so alien to the framers of this Article.

UDHR Article 25(1) gets even more ambitious and holds that “[e]veryone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” Unfortunately, these material blessings emerge from the efforts of the people who strive to produce them. Given this undeniable fact of earthly existence, the only way that a government could possibly guarantee such blessings to anyone is to steal them from somebody else, thus divorcing the fruits of labor from the laborers. Reflecting on this for a moment reveals its truth: if I obtain material blessings by my own efforts or by voluntary interaction with others, I do not require the UDHR’s protection at all; if, however, I cannot obtain material blessings through toil, trade or charity, the UDHR steps in and obligates someone else to provide for me even if he may not wish to do so. If this counts as my “right,” then I effectively have enslaved the other person by asserting ownership over his labor. No one of sound mind or morals can seriously advocate this as a “right.”

Reaching into the schoolhouse, UDHR Article 26(1) proclaims: “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. . . .” Yet nothing is free – somebody must pay to provide this compulsory education. Many societies historically have left it to a child’s parents to provide for their own child’s education, while other societies have decided to shift those costs onto the community as a whole. Article 26 goes far beyond any such policy debate by outlawing the first option and mandating the second, since “free” in modern-speak means that someone other than the customer pays. So in the Article’s twisted logic, a parent has no duty to pay for his own child’s education, but everyone else who is not the child’s parent does. How this imposition can possibly represent a “right” is unimaginable.

Article 26(2) digs deeper, past the schoolhouse and into the human mind: “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.” Here the undoing of any sane conception of rights becomes complete, as even opinions are to be strangled in the crib if deemed improper. Apparently we may not entertain any doubts or criticisms of “human rights” and “fundamental freedoms” as the U.N. defines them, but rather we must embrace them and support the U.N.’s manifold activities. And while Article 26(3) mentions in passing that “[p]arents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children,” this offers little solace because the drafters surely did not seek to nullify the Article’s main goals. Any parent who has ever dared to challenge the scope or content of the compulsory education of his children can attest that a parent’s “prior right” counts for little.

Article 29(3) lays bare the UDHR’s unworkable nature by indulging in one final and supreme contradiction: “These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” So the UDHR admits that the entire panoply of rights – from free expression to “free” education – is a farce. If these truly were rights, we could exercise them however we saw fit, even to denounce the U.N. and its works.

In spite of this “Second Generation” lunacy, the U.S. Supreme Court has favorably referenced the UDHR on a number of occasions over the years, going so far as to state in 2004 that it carries “moral authority” despite lacking the legally binding force of a treaty. While that is unsettling enough, the promoters of the UDHR craftily split it in half and re-packaged it as two separate treaties so as to overcome piecemeal the objections that had relegated the UDHR to the “moral” universe.

I Was Wrong

A few years ago I made a prediction that the worsening economy would generate a return to social conservatism, particularly in the sense of rejecting shallow forms of entertainment that numb people's minds to reality. Reality, I thought, would intrude and force people to take stock of their lives.

While this may have happened for a few out there, it certainly has not taken place on a grand scale. From what I can tell, the opposite has occurred as people cling to their entertainment more furiously than ever. The recent riots at Penn State over the dismissal of a football coach are merely one example, but a powerful one of how people prefer to risk their lives rather than their illusions. Hollywood continues churning out profitable sewage, and people continue spending obscene amounts of money on sports events, concerts, travel, and the like.

It's a form of self-medication or psychological survival I had underestimated. Perhaps this generation is too addicted to feeling good ever to mature; the hard work of salvage may have to fall to those who inherit this mess and have no recollection of the "good life."

So Long, Smokin' Joe

One of my personal heroes, former heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, passed away recently. I consider him a hero not because of his skill, which was considerable, but rather because of his character.

Soft-spoken, generous, yet purposeful and focused with deadly intensity on his craft, Joe Frazier was a gentleman athlete of a kind all but extinct. He came up from poverty as the son of a sharecropper in a time and place extremely unfair for blacks, but he carried no chip on his shoulder and managed to win universal admiration as a man -- not a black man or a white man, but just a man.

His generosity extended even to his nemesis and polar opposite, Muhammad Ali, whom Frazier gave money and moral support when the chips were down. Ali was vain, brash, crude, and generally merciless when trashing Frazier in public. Ali enjoyed an upper middle-class childhood yet portrayed himself as somehow more "authentic" than Frazier, accusing him of being an Uncle Tom for his reticent pose. Frazier bore most of it stoically, losing his cool only once or twice (which provoked far more outrage than Ali's ceaseless obnoxiousness).

Frazier had become champion when Ali was stripped of the title for refusing to serve in Vietnam. As a gentleman, Frazier gave Ali a shot to prove himself the "real" champion, something Ali never tired of proclaiming. But Frazier had other plans. He knelt in prayer before that fight and asked for strength because he knew in his heart that Ali was not righteous. In the fifteenth round, Frazier unleashed his ferocious left hook and knocked Ali on his ass, a scene that I never tire of watching.

The world has precious few real men left. With Frazier's departure it has even fewer. So long, Smokin' Joe.

How's That Post-Religious Society Working Out For You?

Two employees of a Domino's franchise burn down a neighboring Papa John's, the motive being to attract more business.

Two employees of an abortion clinic kill babies shortly after they were born. After all, according to their worldview the babies were not even human moments earlier.

A woman stabs her boyfriend for cheating at Monopoly.

A woman attacks her nephew for using her toilet paper.

A man firebombs Taco Bell because his chalupa didn't have enough meat.

A mother locks her two sons, ages 3 and 5, in a dog kennel.

A woman has sex with her prison-inmate boyfriend on a city bus, while another prison inmate holds her infant daughter.

Roving mobs of teenagers assault motorists in Peoria, Illinois.

What did you think would happen when people came to believe that self-gratification is the highest good? This is the message trumpeted from every "cultural" outlet we have today, whether it's television, movies, books, or music. You wanted a world without restraints or hang-ups, and now you've got it. Congratulations.

Work Can Be Fun

Sometimes I truly enjoy my work, such as when I finish writing an appellate brief like this:

The only way [appellant] can succeed in her quest to assert a common-law claim of bad faith against [appellee] for what occurred in 2001 is to repeal the doctrine of collateral estoppel and dispute a federal judgment holding that she did not assert such a claim as a matter of Montana law; to repeal the doctrine of res judicata and ignore a federal proceeding that disposed of all claims she brought or otherwise might have brought; to re-write the Montana Code and this Court’s precedent to enable the saving statute to overcome a final adjudication; and to broaden the reach of equity to encompass situations where a plaintiff simply neglected to make the best case she could. This quest has left in its wake a debris field of protean, contradictory arguments that [appellant] has pursued unsuccessfully since 2002 in Montana’s state and federal courts, obligating [appellee] to defend itself long after the tempest of litigation should have died down. It is [appellee] who warrants justice at long last, not [appellant], whose appeal lacks merit and must be denied.

Simple Pleasures

I wouldn't want you to think that everything on here is negative. Life, no matter how difficult it can be, is wonderful and something to be cherished. Whatever negativity or cynicism I give off is directly proportionate to my optimism and ideals, which generate a great deal of pain when shattered. As proof, here is a short list of things that make me glad to be alive.

The first time I kiss a woman.

When I wake up on Saturday morning and momentarily fear that I have to go to work, but then realize what day it is and sink back into bed.

On a related note, when I dream that I'm still in school and missed all my classes for the semester just before the final exam, but then wake up and feel liberated.

Puppies and kittens.

Watching a speed demon on the highway get boxed into a slow lane.

The year's first snowfall.

Trying out a new brewery.

When the lights go dim in a movie theater.

Learning a new word in Spanish.

Learning a new word in English.

The moment my workout routine is finished, and my brain is bathed in endorphins while my body is covered in sweat.

Thinking up a bizarre chess combination to win a game that was lost.

Making the final car payment.

Seeing parents take their child to his or her very first day of school.

When the court issues an order that quotes my motion almost verbatim.

Upsets of any kind, when the person who had no chance of winning does.

When one of my Spanish students gets it.

Christmas.

Finally remembering the name of an awesome song and downloading it.

Reading about a historical event from thousands of years ago that sounds exactly like something in the news yesterday.

The rumble of an oncoming train.

A late night conversation with a small circle of close friends.

When college basketball season finally ends and stops interfering with regular programming.

Hearing the media's and the other candidates' teeth grind whenever Ron Paul answers a question.

Interlude On Matters Economic

I will post another installment regarding human rights very soon, but first I'd like to share something else I once wrote that addresses at least some of the causes behind the global economic meltdown.

The International Monetary Fund And The World Bank

In conjunction with their expanding control over global trade by means of the WTO, the political class collaborates to control national currencies and public spending by means of two bureaucracies that have long outlived any usefulness that might have justified their creation: the International Monetary Fund (the “IMF”) and the International Bank For Reconstruction And Development (the “IBRD,” more commonly known as the “World Bank”).

Both of these entities are the brainchildren of the Allied Powers during the waning days of World War II, who met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to hammer out a system whereby wealthy nations would impose financial stability on what they saw as an intolerably turbulent world. Under the system they eventually settled upon, the IMF and the World Bank would establish their respective headquarters within a stone’s throw of each other in Washington, D.C., from which they would carry out interrelated yet distinct missions to elevate the dollar into the world’s primary means of exchange, quite literally the equivalent of gold. On the one hand, the IMF would labor to ensure that global currencies remained at “fixed” exchange rates decreed by the Bretton Woods Agreement: by lending dollars to governments worldwide, and by making all dollars exchangeable for U.S. gold at $35 per ounce, the IMF guaranteed that those governments possessed sufficient reserves of dollars and/or gold to prop up the artificial exchange rates notwithstanding the ebb and flow of currency demand. For its part, the World Bank would also lend money to foreign governments, but for the more targeted purpose of financing development projects within those nations (e.g., highways, dams, etc.).

Problems with this system become apparent in short order. The World Bank lends money to governments, not to private entities, which proves a most counterproductive method for fostering economic growth. Governments disburse such monies for reasons of patronage and political expediency, guaranteeing that corrupt insiders will receive the largesse, and accomplishing little to energize free-market innovation and competition. While this did not impair the World Bank’s ability to function, a congenital defect indeed plagued the IMF, whose avowed devotion to a fixed exchange rate and a gold standard stood in fatal opposition to each member nation’s cowardly avoidance of domestic gold standards. Nations the world over are addicted to printing surplus currency as a stealth tactic for raising revenue and paying off creditors, who receive their money before the inflationary effects of this counterfeiting can ripple through the economy and eat away at the savings of ordinary citizens. Politicians prefer this technique because the alternative – raising taxes – proves far too visible and disfavorable for doing business. A domestic gold standard would frustrate this chicanery, so nations have long since spurned the gold standard and opted for “fiat” currency that is backed by nothing more than a governmental promise to honor it. The United States itself switched to a full fiat currency when President Franklin Roosevelt took us off the gold standard during the New Deal. With the IMF now at its disposal, the United States could routinely print excess dollars and obligate other nations to expand their own currencies to maintain the mandated exchange rate, thereby masking the dollar’s own decreasing value. Like a boomerang, those excess dollars came back to haunt the United States because the dollar holders increasingly exercised their right to exchange the dollars for gold. Faced with rapidly vanishing gold reserves, President Nixon abolished the United States’ commitment to the international gold standard in 1971. Hence the very purpose of the IMF – maintaining fixed exchange rates pegged to gold – had vanished. Currencies now “floated” on the open market, and exchange rates among these currencies fluctuated wildly in response to the activities of international traders and currency speculators.

One would be a fool, of course, to entertain the notion that a bureaucracy would depart the scene along with its reason for existing. Consistent with all human experience, the IMF dug in its heels and strained to find (or fabricate) any plausible excuse for continuing forward – and it latched onto a sinister one indeed. Teaming up with the World Bank and some of America’s most prominent private banks, the IMF embarked on a scheme to keep the poor nations of the world in a state of financial crisis that would necessitate perpetual IMF assistance, and along with that assistance, conditions and controls that would forever enthrall those nations to the United States and to their own political rulers. Now off the gold standard, American banks found themselves awash in de-valued, surplus money that they would eagerly lend to foreign governments, such loans to finance development projects awarded to well-connected American companies. Corrupt and irresponsible foreign governments, of course, would borrow far more than they could ever hope to repay their American lenders, eventually falling into a crunch of dwindling dollar reserves. At this point the IMF comes to the rescue under the aegis of protecting the foreign currency’s value with an infusion of taxpayer-provided dollars that, rather conveniently, find their way into the pockets of the original lenders.

This international money-laundering system makes the World Bank and private lenders happy because they have a fail-safe method for making and collecting oversized loans. This makes the IMF happy because it appears to have an ongoing purpose for sucking taxpayer money away from its member nations. This makes major corporations happy because foreign governments can now afford to pay them princely sums to implement “development” projects. This makes Third-World politicians happy because they can continue to dispense money and favors to their friends. This makes Washington, D.C. happy because it showers taxpayer dollars around the globe with which to dictate other nations’ domestic policy via the IMF’s loan conditions.

The ones who feel unhappy are the very ones whom this system is purportedly designed to assist, namely the peoples of the developing world, since they endure the economic and political chaos wrought by perpetual indebtedness.

In 1994, for example, Mexico was in the process of defaulting on its enormous foreign loans when the IMF and the World Bank stepped in to help orchestrate a relief package of tens of billion dollars, money that provided relief only to the original lenders and did nothing to avert a serious recession in the Mexican economy. This sorry episode paved the way for a similar catastrophe in East Asia only a few years later, as lenders had absorbed the lesson that any unwise investment decisions they might make would be covered. Countries such as Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia had enjoyed several years of foreign-financed growth until they found themselves drowning in a sea of debt and unable to re-pay, touching off a collapse in the region’s currency values and stock prices. Once again, the IMF and company swooped down to the rescue, further demolishing any incentive for sound financial planning. And once again, the IMF’s actions did not avert the turmoil: hundreds of businesses collapsed; millions of people plunged into poverty; and civil unrest in Thailand and Indonesia led to the ouster of both countries’ heads of state. Not long thereafter, Argentina found itself in a similar ordeal resulting from years of obscenely large loans and prior IMF bailouts, touching off a wave of bank withdrawals and capital flight. Riots erupted when citizens learned that the government was freezing their bank accounts to prevent a total collapse, and Buenos Aires witnessed vandalism, fires, and clashes with police (leaving several people dead). The president declared a state of emergency, but he soon had no choice but to flee the country and leave an imploding government behind him – which soon announced that it was defaulting on its debt of several hundred billion dollars. One notable exception to the default was the IMF, which received from Argentina’s government a complete re-payment of its prior loans. Although the private lenders did not fare so well, the IMF went to bat for these partners in crime and criticized Argentina’s government for not fully re-paying them as well. As the oligarchs quibbled over details, thousands of newly-impoverished Argentines darkened the streets in search of sustenance.

In the final analysis, the World Bank and the IMF embody the worst aspects of crony capitalism on the world stage: the fusion of big business with big government in a conspiracy to protect their mutual interests at the expense of ours. With the recent meltdown in financial markets worldwide – a direct result of governmental distortions of the economy – the political class has spared no expense to bail out its well-heeled friends on Wall Street with taxpayer money, and they have also come forward with a proposal for even greater control over economic affairs than currently exists. Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, expressed his frustration at “a confusing mix of diffused accountability, regulatory competition, and a complex web of rules that create perverse incentives and leave huge opportunities for arbitrage and evasion.” To deal with this situation, he opined that “the Fed has broad responsibility for financial stability not matched by direct authority, and the consequences of the actions we have taken in this crisis make it more important that we close that gap.” Otherwise stated, Geithner (who recently became the Secretary of the Treasury) imagines that the Fed has a responsibility greater than the sum of its powers, so he wishes “to close the gap” between his imagination and the frustrating reality he confronts. Echoing these sinister sentiments, the U.N.’s 2008 World Economic And Social Survey proclaimed that “[m]arkets cannot be left to their own devices in respect of delivering appropriate and desired levels of economic security,” a conclusion that the IMF heartily concurred with in its own report. And more recently, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson openly proclaimed that American taxpayers should foot the bill to establish the federal government’s hegemony over foreign banks by bailing them out as well. When answering the question whether Americans really wanted to spend their tax dollars this way, Paulson had the gall to state the following:

That's a distinction without a difference to the American people. The key here is protecting the system. . . . We have a global financial system and we are talking very aggressively with other countries around the world and encouraging them to do similar things, and I believe a number of them will.

These statements leave no doubt as to the totalitarian mindset at play here: national boundaries mean nothing; governments should conspire to rule their own citizens as well as each other's; “financial stability” and the “appropriate levels of economic activity” on the world stage are to be determined by politicians, not by free people pursuing their own ends. We are witnessing the creation of a global New Deal that shreds the Constitution even more than previously imagined and will have no one to “bail it out” when it too goes bankrupt.

Human Rights -- Part I

There is righteous anger fueling the OWS movement, especially for young people who stayed on script and did the right thing only to find nothing to show for it (trust me, I know how infuriating that can be). As I mentioned in my previous post, the danger is that righteous anger will be channeled into unrighteous ends, as so often occurs when government commandeers language. And so it has with "human rights," a phrase percolating around the OWS-sphere that spells trouble.

This may sound confusing because no sane person would oppose human rights, and I certainly do not. Humans have rights. What we are dealing with, though, is the artificial and government-supplied definition of that term, which naturally is conducive to government power. As a result, the official term "human rights" poses perhaps the greatest threat to actual human rights.

I discussed this at length in something I wrote a few years ago. The chapter is too lengthy to re-print in one shot, so I will give a first installment here and follow up in later posts.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS HOAX

The appealing phrase “human rights” has taken root in the public consciousness as an unquestioned good, assuming its exalted place next to “civil rights,” “equality,” and “democracy.” What all of these slogans bear in common – apart from their effectiveness at shutting down rational debate – is that governments monopolize their definition and implementation, thereby fusing idealism with statism and advancing central control more speedily than otherwise possible. “Human rights” is a shibboleth that has proved especially handy in this regard because it delivers a pre-packaged (though nebulous) set of notions to every private citizen worldwide and encourages him to chisel away at his own nation’s institutions from within, thereby complementing the efforts of globalists from without. In so doing, “human rights” rips apart international law as a humble system prescribing the rights and duties of nations, beckoning us to rush into the arms of a supranational legal order that will dictate our rights and duties as individuals. Unsurprisingly, several treaties and U.N. declarations have cropped up over the past half-century that trumpet “human rights” and encourage bureaucrats to interfere in every nation’s domestic affairs. Also unsurprisingly, this interference has spread beyond obviously oppressive practices such as torture or genocide, and has begun prying into the most innocent of customs, even purely private conduct, whose only fault is non-conformity with prevailing elite opinion. Very few dare to question this state of affairs, which we must do if we wish to preserve our identity as an independent and sovereign people. At bottom, the cant of “human rights” is nothing more than a pernicious hoax.

First, human rights are far too precious and plentiful ever to be codified. As America’s Founders understood, any attempt to enumerate rights misplaces the burden onto the individual to prove what he is entitled to do, when it should be the government’s burden to prove what it is empowered to do. Our Bill of Rights faced strong resistance for this very reason, and even when adopted, it carried the reminder in the Ninth Amendment that the enumeration of rights must not be perceived as exhaustive. Modern treaties and resolutions purporting to list our rights lack any such saving grace and are a transparent ruse to entice us into selling ourselves short by accepting a fixed, finite bill of goods. Moreover, these modern instruments name a few paltry prohibitions on governmental power, fostering the deadly assumption that governments may do anything not prohibited. A more worthwhile endeavor might devote itself to listing the few things that governments can do, thus assuring that any power not listed may not be exercised. But the political class has no interest in any such undertaking, preferring instead to hammer out the few behaviors that we as individuals may indulge in, meanwhile congratulating itself as caring and compassionate. The very fact that governments, who pose the greatest threat to our rights, are collaborating to outline those rights should send chills down our spines.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. A look beneath the popular verbiage reveals that the content of these “human rights” treaties has little to do with securing individual freedom, and much more to do with subduing the individual under a fashionable form of leftism that calls for the redistribution of wealth and the silencing of unpopular viewpoints. Thus far, the United States has mounted at least some resistance to these fraudulent enterprises, either by refusing to ratify them or by adopting reservations that render them toothless upon ratification. Nonetheless, a great deal of “human rights” runoff has seeped into our domestic legal system and those of several other countries, and the drumbeat continues for the United States to discard its lingering objections once and for all.

For a taste of what qualifies as a “human rights” violation in modern parlance, consider the plight of Alphonse de Valk, a Canadian priest who dared to express opposition to homosexuality and to homosexual literature promulgated in elementary schools. An offended soul filed a complaint with the Alberta “Human Rights Tribunal,” which then ordered the priest to pay a fine; to issue an apology to the person who had filed the complaint; and to refrain from uttering similar opinions in the future. This blatant assault on religious freedom and freedom of speech is not unusual, and if we take a look at some of the most prominent “human rights” instruments in the world today, we discover just how scarce an honest conception of liberty is in the world today.

What Did I Just Say?

Take a glance at my last post, cogitate on it, and now look at this news story I just stumbled on. There must be a way I can make some money with these uncanny predictive skills.

Good News And Bad News

Protests are spreading across the United States. The good news is that people are waking up to the serious crisis we face. The bad news is that people are likely to call for greater governmental power and control to deal with the crisis -- the chants and slogans displayed in the video make that abundantly clear. Couple that with the federal government's unapologetic assassination of an American citizen, and you can see the writing on the wall.

More than two thousand years ago Plato observed that democracy always produces tyranny, and America's founders (who, unlike today's politicians, knew something of history) labored mightily to prevent democracy from taking root here. But it did, and most Americans now feel entitled to plunder each other at the ballot box. There is no way to save America as a geographic whole, for the barbarians are already within the gates. America as a "shining city on a hill" can survive only if a geographic portion and its people devote themselves to keeping it that way, and keeping out the hordes of liberty-destroyers who are Americans in name only.

Here We Go Again

The economy claims another victim, who makes a spectacle of killing himself. I predicted more of these in my recent post, Suicide Non-Solution, and it's unfortunate that I was right.

EDIT

The article mentions that the man was divorced with three daughters, so he was likely also a victim of the modern divorce industry. Granted, only he can be blamed for his death, but he was a victim before he died.

Highly Instructive

A youth football league has restricted a player from scoring too many touchdowns because he's just too damn good. While I feel sorry for the boy, it's better that he learn this lesson now. Excellence does not inspire people to try harder or achieve more; quite to the contrary, excellence breeds resentment and motivates people to attack you, either directly or through manipulation of the rules (the latter has become quite popular in the workplace and the political system, for it accommodates cowardice).

You have a choice in life, my young friend: be excellent, or be popular. I hope you choose to anger as many people as you can.

My Apologies

I used to think that Americans today take nothing seriously, but I must admit to being wrong. After studying the issue more closely, I have found that Americans take three things very seriously and will sacrifice all else to obtain them: money, sex, and entertainment. Sorry for being too quick to judge.

The Supreme Court Tackles Obamacare

The nets are aflutter with talk of how the Supreme Court will decide whether Obamacare is constitutional, but as usual, this is mistaken. As a mere branch of the federal government, the Supreme Court is inferior to the Constitution and lacks the power to make something constitutional which is not. All the Supreme Court can do is decide the particular case brought before it, using the Constitution as one of many reference points.

Protestants founded America, and it's sad that a crucial aspect of the Protestant worldview has vanished from the public mind: high priests cannot monopolize the meaning of scripture or impair the right of the faithful to follow it. Once the Court has completed its work, the rest of us have the right and duty to uphold the Constitution as it is, not as the high priests of the Court believe it to be. Perhaps the Court will get it right, but perhaps not.

Twilight Series A Sad Commentary On Modern Love

The Twilight novels and films are a pop-culture phenomenon, raking in vast sums of money for a mere tale of teen romance. I have no problem with mindless entertainment, as I myself enjoy several novels and films no deeper than a typical Facebook post. But there's the rub -- I admit that my entertainment is mindless, whereas the reverence and even cultishness surrounding Twilight say something about modern notions of love, and it's rather disheartening.

Consider that the story presents love as nothing more than lust -- Edward "loves" Bella because she smells good, and Bella "loves" Edward because he's gorgeous and superhuman. There is virtually no character development to explain why these people might identify with each other on a spiritual level. Bella vocalizes this shallowness by offering to stay with Edward forever even if it means parting with her soul, "whatever that is," she mutters. The fans agree, apparently lacking a concept of their own spiritual existence or worth.

Bella yearns to become a vampire while still young so she and Edward can be gorgeous, hot, and bothered together forever. Getting old is gross, and the modern (materialistic) mind has difficulty grasping the idea of staying in love after strength or beauty has waned. I never thought I'd say this, but Shallow Hal is insightful on this point: the physically beautiful are often inwardly ugly, and vice versa. Twilight throws this wisdom out the window and preaches that beauty truly is skin deep.

Bella and Edward's youthful lust will endure forever, which supposedly means that their love will too. But at the "twilight" of real life, the body withers and only the soul remains fresh. If you want a love that lasts forever, you must base it on the soul. Unfortunately, hordes of Twilight fans -- young and old alike -- are founding their hopes and dreams on the ephemeral body. They will ache when true twilight comes.

Perry Reveals Himself As A Monster

At tonight's debate, Texas governor Rick Perry defended his decision to force young girls to get the HPV vaccine, arguing "at the end of the day, I am always going to err on the side of life." This single statement encapsulates the materialist, safety-at-any-price philosophy that desecrates the founders' memory. Even aside from the perverse undertone of this policy -- i.e., that the government accommodates underage fornication -- are its totalitarian implications. It wipes out a person's right to choose what risks to take, and it could just as easily justify harvesting organs from one person against his will to save the lives of ten.

Some things are worse than death, such as the loss of dignity and liberty. A true American instinctively knows this, and Mr. Perry has revealed himself to be anything but.

The Tenth Anniversary

Ten years ago, I was working my first job out of law school in a tall building in downtown Miami. As I scanned my list of tasks for the day, I heard people in the hall talking about a commercial jet plane that had crashed into a building in New York. I followed them to the conference room and watched as the spectacle unfolded on the large-screen television there; before long, we all decided it was wise to go home, and soon I joined an exodus of cars flooding down through the parking garage.

I can only imagine what it must have been like for the terrified souls in New York that day, whether they were within the towers or merely within sight of them. My heart goes out to the living and the dead.

The challenge, as always, is to find meaning and purpose amidst the tragedy. Politicians exhort us to conclude that the tragedy occurred because terrorists hate us for being free, and that we must become less free in order to defeat them. As usual, I dissent. I'm an American, and as such, I reject any suggestion that I must surrender my liberty in order to protect my life -- I would much sooner lay down my life, as my ancestors believed when founding this country.

Otherwise stated, a terrorist might take my life, but the federal government is taking my liberty, which is far worse. To argue that liberty must yield represents abject surrender and disgraces every noble impulse undergirding America. If this argument prevails, the terrorists will have succeeded in bringing down much more than a few buildings.

I Am Sick Of Ron Paul

Blasphemy? No, hear me out. I believe Ron Paul is a good man and perhaps the only man of principle within a 100-mile radius of the Capitol. He surely is the only candidate for president who 1) understands the Constitution, and 2) wishes to see the Constitution upheld. (The real Constitution, not the Frankenstein's monster hatched by the federal courts, which are mere appendages of the federal government and thus inferior to the Constitution.)

Yet it is exactly because Ron Paul is principled that his presence on Capitol Hill and the campaign trail does more harm than good. He bestows legitimacy on a system gone renegade, and he provides false hope that this renegade can be tamed and reformed. Like a lovestruck adolescent, Ron Paul is demeaning himself and charting a path to ruin. A true man of principle removes himself from the company of swine; he does not remain among them nor cast pearls at their feet.

For those who disagree and maintain that the system can be brought into line with the Constitution, you must lack familiarity with that document and all that the federal government has done to repudiate it. As I wrote on another occasion:

Think for a moment what would have to occur for the federal government to obey the Constitution and restore fiscal sanity. “Mandatory” spending on unconstitutional wealth transfers such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would have to be eliminated or at least phased out. “Discretionary” spending that legislators love to funnel to their constituents would also have to be deeply slashed, not merely to balance the budget but also to terminate unconstitutional wealth transfers to corporations, universities, farmers, and countless others who lobby furiously for this pork. Congress would have to cease legislating on roughly 70%-80% of the subjects it now arrogates to itself in violation of the Tenth Amendment.

The President would have to stop issuing “executive orders” that carry the force of law despite lacking congressional consent, and he would also have to suspend all war operations until securing a declaration of same from Congress. The Supreme Court would have to disavow precedent from the past three generations that, among other things, enables federal courts to interfere routinely in local matters under the guise of the Fourteenth Amendment; that gives a blank check to congressional and presidential assertions of power under the guise of “interstate commerce” or “spending for the general welfare”; and that has distorted “judicial review” into a power of amending the Constitution rather than enforcing it.

And let us not forget the hordes occupying the bureaucracy, most of whom would have to quit their jobs and halt the printing presses from churning out tens of thousands of unlawful regulations that Congress never voted on.

To put it mildly, this is not going to happen. People from all walks of life have a vested interest in the unconstitutional status quo and will never vote to relinquish it. Welfare recipients, Social Security dependents, federal employees, high-flying banks, both major political parties, mal-educated college graduates, and the indolent majority will never budge. We could hold elections from now until doomsday without seeing reform that comes anywhere near to accomplishing what the Constitution requires.

Ron Paul knows full well that the federal train has run off the tracks, and for him to persist in believing that it can be brought back displays an astounding level of naïveté and historical ignorance. No government voluntarily surrenders power once acquired, especially not when there is a lapdog judiciary devoted to mythologizing such power as righteous.

Our only hope for survival is for a critical mass of Americans (not the majority, mind you) to wake up and identify the modern federal government as an illegal enterprise. Paul's fervent participation in that illegal enterprise postpones the healthy day of reckoning.

A New Quote

Sometimes an idea strikes me that sounds as though it might make a good quote. As a child, I came up with "I have my facts; you have your opinions." That one was so popular that people now quote it back at me in a vain attempt to prove me wrong. In my idealistic adolescence, I invented "reality is the way things are, not the way things have to be." Here's a new one:

"The ordinary person does what is right when convenient. The extraordinary person does what is right even when inconvenient. The saint does what is right even if it kills him."

On Women

It's funny how your outlook on life changes as you grow older. When I was young, women frustrated me because they defied all logic. At this stage of my life, though, I love women precisely because I can't figure them out. I have dated women from Spain to Bolivia to Mexico to Florida to Virginia to New Jersey and now to Montana, and while every one of them was unique, none of them made any sense. And that's what makes them so damn interesting.

The Libyan Bellwether

With the ouster of Gaddafi and the installation of "democracy" in Libya, events on the world stage have taken a sinister turn indeed. Invasions of other countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq at least had a pretext of national security, however wafer thin, but Libya represents a new summit of shamelessness, as follows: we may invade a foreign country and overturn its government merely because we dislike how that government treats its own people. This is a full and unabashed repudiation of national sovereignty; even the Nuremberg Principles for ousting and punishing the Nazis were predicated on international aggression, not domestic abuse. If anything, the Libyan conquest embodies what the Nuremberg Principles were specifically designed to abolish.

Libya is a test case for a worldwide Fourteenth Amendment, that deus ex machina by which the federal government swoops down onto the stage and demolishes state sovereignty in the name of do-gooding. The federal government's internal war presaged the Shermanesque campaign against national sovereignty on the world stage today, which is precisely why I wrote two books titled Unlawful Government. My first one -- Preserving America In A Post-Constitutional Age -- documents our domestic tragedy. My second one -- The Gathering Threat Of Global Hegemony -- explores the extension of this tragedy into foreign affairs. Whatever happens next, at least I can say I told you so.

INTRODUCTION

In Unlawful Government: Preserving America In A Post-Constitutional Age, I explored some of the ways that the federal government has made itself the master of the law rather than the servant. Consistent with its self-appointed role as absolute lawgiver, today’s federal government casts a shadow over virtually every aspect of American society, leaving nothing of circumstance beyond the taxing, spending, and commandeering reach of politics. As a consequence, the once-rich tapestry of American life has faded into a spiritual and cultural wasteland characterized by stifling political correctness; larcenous wealth redistribution; a vanishing middle class; the mainstreaming of obscenity and profanity; the subsidizing of illegal-alien invaders; and the militarizing of civil authority. Our ability to elect the persons who perpetrate these outrages does nothing to make us free, but rather invites us to partake in our own ruin. Such is the result championed by the self-styled idealists occupying both major political parties, who fly opposing banners and sing competing slogans, but who all march to the same tune. Their ascendancy has heralded America’s decline.

What makes this state of affairs somewhat tolerable is that the American government counts as only one among many, and that no single government dictates terms for the entire human race. Competition among sovereignties, a noble pursuit once enshrined in our domestic Constitution among the States, now survives only by the grace of foreigners. So even though our American experiment had been hijacked, we could find some measure of comfort in that we now inhabit a global economy where we can move our money and ourselves with greater ease than ever. Americans can outsource, offshore, and expatriate away from the government’s machinations, a refreshing reality that thumbs its nose at the political class and its delusions of grandeur. Recent data indicate that approximately ten percent of households in the United States have already committed to moving abroad or are seriously considering doing so, while another eleven percent express a desire to reside abroad part-time – astonishingly high numbers that run the gamut across all professions and age groups. Better yet, the sheer number of countries is exploding, as bloated centers of political power such as the old Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia fracture and crumble. In today’s world of nearly two hundred competing sovereignties we find unprecedented variety and freedom from central control. And deep down we feel a sense of adventure, envisioning faraway lands and exotic peoples; knowing that some corner of creation remains free from the strangling grip of officialdom; and daring to hope that the errors of history can eventually be righted.

However, our cause for celebration strikes terror in our rulers, who see their influence on the wane as we grow more nimble-footed in an ungoverned world. Faced with this quickening flight from their tightening grip, the members of the political class have refused to admit the error of their ways or to accept their well-deserved irrelevance; instead, they have chosen to swim against the tide of history and strive for a universal control from which no one may escape. To advance this quest for global hegemony, they employ a spectrum of tactics ranging from transnational regulations to economic sanctions to outright military violence. But most important of all, they swaddle these tactics in idealistic verbiage such as “democracy,” “human rights,” and “free trade” in order to de-fuse popular suspicion or criticism, thus re-enacting the domestic saga of the United States whereby the federal government flattened all competing sources of power in the lofty names of “equality” and “civil rights.” Now, instead of murdering the sovereignty of mere component States, the political class aims to murder the sovereignty of nation-states so as to erect a uniform, global authority in which political power is preserved against all external challenge. By accomplishing this, the political class will at last have a free hand to carry out massive wealth redistribution and its corresponding evils, ensuring that the remaining pockets of civilization yield to a worldwide ghetto presided over by oligarchs.

The only way that the political class can successfully destroy national sovereignty is to destroy international law, whose very name bespeaks an arrangement of affairs between independent actors. Similar to our Constitution and its deference to the several States, international law leaves each nation-state the master of its own destiny and with presumptive power to govern its own citizens in its own way. National sovereignty’s essential role in the international legal order is reflected by the fact that the very sources of international law have their roots in national consent, as outlined on the next page:

Sources Of International Law

Treaties -- Agreements binding only those nations that sign and ratify them.

Customary Law -- A widespread practice among nations based on the belief (opinio juris) that such practice is legally required.

General Principles Of Law -- Principles appearing in the domestic legal systems of the vast majority of nations comprising the world community.

These benchmarks illustrate – contrary to prevailing opinion – that international law constitutes a purer form of law than what most modern governments offer their own people, since true law stems from the customs and wishes of the participants. For example, under the common law that America inherited from England, judges did not presume to create law, but rather to observe it and uphold it as manifest in the people’s way of life. Likewise, international law follows the practices of the family of nation-states, seldom daring to divorce itself from the very community whence it springs.

This legal system – with its foundations in national consent and international consensus – poses a direct threat to the political class, which conceives of “law” as simply whatever those with the greatest power might decree on a given day. Resenting the persistence of a global arrangement whose rules are not arbitrarily handed down by a sovereign, the political class has made disturbing progress towards radically transforming international law from a limited system addressing national rights and responsibilities to an all-encompassing system addressing individual rights and responsibilities. By muscling aside the nation-state as the primary subject of international law, the political class hopes to melt down each nation’s independence into a homogenized political system that directly regulates us as individuals, crushing the very rights and freedoms that the political class claims to be protecting.

We constantly hear that the world is chaotic and needs the guiding hand of government to steer it; that international law is toothless against evil regimes; and that the better angels of our nature demand that we take steps to rein in the abuses of the nation-state system. It is undeniable that nation-states often behave in a callous and brutal fashion, but for all the abuses that nation-states commit – and which the political class incessantly invokes as justification for global governance – a world with a single and unrivaled sovereign represents a cure far worse than the disease. National sovereignty and international competition are essential to the survival of human civilization, for they limit the reach and strength of any single government, and they compel governments to face external enemies in a creative struggle whereby good ideas have a chance to outlast and defeat bad ones. If Weimar Germany of the 1920s and ’30s had been a global democracy rather than a merely national one, Hitler’s election to high office and subsequent seizure of absolute power would have spelled a worldwide Third Reich rather than a localized dictatorship that, fortunately, could be resisted with outside military force. In a uniformly governed world, any opponent of such tyranny would be merely internal; he would be labeled as an outlaw; and he would be imprisoned or executed. One can run this “thought experiment” to envision any number of nightmarish outcomes, such as a global Mao Tse-tung, a global Pol Pot, or a global Stalin.

We know for a fact that governments kill far more of their own people than each others’: during the twentieth century alone, governments murdered roughly 160 million of their own citizens in bloody orgies of “democide,” while killing only a fraction of that number through international warfare. So if the nation-state system seems lawless and vicious, it surely cannot match the potential brutality of a world under a single government. In light of this knowledge, it is folly to exchange a world of divided sovereignties, however imperfect, for a single worldwide sovereignty, however promising. One would be just as foolish to consolidate all of the world’s criminal organizations into a single unrivaled syndicate on the belief that this would reduce thievery and violence.

Yet the political class wishes to wrap us in the chains of global government on the slender inference that we can make such a government “good,” and on the even more slender inference that such a government will remain “good.” This assertion falls to pieces merely upon considering what these same people believe constitutes good government: the Leviathan state unbounded by the rule of law, whose power to legislate, regulate, tax, spend, and destroy continues to swell with no end in sight. A glimpse at history likewise disproves the political class’s rhetoric, for the precious few governments we can honestly rank as admirable did not remain so for very long. Mankind is far from perfect and will remain as such, and any government he constructs will eventually regress to the mean and indulge in the affronts to life, liberty, and property that typify the story of civilization. We would be much wiser to evolve by allowing for the birth and death of diverse governments, just as nature evolves by allowing for the birth and death of diverse individuals. In short, better to have several hundred bites at the apple than just one.

Sadly, the “mainstream” debate concerning international affairs ignores asking whether a global centralization of power should occur and concerns itself solely with how it should occur, much the same way that political discourse degenerated within the United States. “Conservatives” call for global rule under American influence, pursuing their vision of “democracy” by way of mass murder and violations of bedrock norms governing the initiation of military force. On the other side of the coin, “liberals” pursue a softer, more systemized version of hegemony by promoting international bureaucracies that will impose “human rights” and “environmentalist” principles that, when viewed up close, amount to little more than warmed-over Marxist schemes for micromanaging our lives and depriving us of any choices or dignity. Both the “conservative” and “liberal” sides of this loaded debate discard the wisdom that all governments are a menace unless offset by other competing governments. Forgotten is the lesson that the best way to curtail abuses of power is to disperse power far and wide, depositing it into so many hands that large-scale transgressions lack the raw material to take shape. As shown by the tragic experience of the United States – a nation conceived in liberty but increasingly bereft of it now – internal legal restraints do not prevent the accumulation and abuse of political power, no matter how ingeniously those restraints may be devised. Only external restraints suffice, and only in a world of multiple sovereignties do we have any hope of continuing the march of human progress.

One may wonder how to avert global hegemony, especially since the awesome forces of modern government constantly portray it as necessary and pursue it with unrelenting vigor. A good start is to take care of matters close to home, as discussed in my previous book with regard to undoing the disproportionate and unconstitutional power concentrated in Washington, D.C. Achieving that objective alone would spark an explosion of competition and creativity worldwide, as the current network of bribery, corruption, and coercion emanating from the federal government would dissipate. Apart from that, the truth of the matter is we don’t really have to stop the process at all, for it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Societies thrive on a unique sense of shared history, as well as on a sense of differentiation from one another; “global society,” however, has no cultural ethos with which to define itself, and no alien culture from which to differentiate itself. The absence of known, hostile societies beyond the sphere of our world frustrates the cohesive spirit that might otherwise give birth to a worldwide identity or corresponding political order. For example, certain members of the swelling European Union have refused to surrender their political sovereignty to the growing mega-bureaucracy in Brussels, Belgium, thereby rejecting one of the most notable attempts in recent history to ratchet political power upwards beyond the nation-state. Even the voices pushing for a more centralized European Union have stressed the need to counterbalance the United States, demonstrating that a perceived external threat is the best way persuade people to submit themselves to the indignities of modern governmental rule.

Modern nations consolidated from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century, but now the opposite trend prevails: communities are increasingly asserting their independence from large centers of power. Pan-governmental schemes run contrary to this trend and will collapse under their own weight, as technology continues to push power over the dams built by the few and into the hands of the many. Political globalization and the dream of global government lack any shared sense of purpose to support them; instead, the gathering threat of global hegemony rests on the modern quicksand of narcissism, anti-culture, and power-worship – the effluvia of a dying civilization rather than a prospering one. But the political class can inflict incredible harm on us by stubbornly refusing to diminish or relinquish its outdated influence, so at the very least we should become acquainted with their designs lest we offer them unwitting support.

What follows is not an exhaustive analysis of international law or worldwide events, but rather a summary of the most prominent menaces creeping across the global landscape. My hope is that with the added benefit of this perspective, individuals and communities can orient themselves in a time when battle lines are being drawn between the centralizing powers of yesterday and the de-centralizing powers of tomorrow.

Seasons Change

Labor Day approaches, and in my new home of Montana I must begin preparing for the cold of autumn and winter. When I arrived here in 2010 I feared the cold because I never truly had to deal with it before. But I have come to appreciate the cold for the simple reason that it more accurately reflects life, whereas tropical climates foster an illusion of perpetual warmth. There is a time to be warm, and there is a time to be cold. Now is the time to be cold.

How I View The World

My previous post concerning the riots got me thinking of a fundamental aspect of how I view the world, and how that view differs from most everyone else's. I toss around the word "materialist" quite a bit, not to signify greediness but rather the modern belief that only matter exists. This philosophical materialism is my point of total departure.

For me, the existence of truth, ideals, and principles is no less real or palpable than the existence of matter -- in older parlance, these intangibles are "reified" in my eyes. When I witness someone lie, break an oath, or flout the rules we all have agreed to live by, I feel it in physical terms as an act of vandalism. It's the same to me as any number of physical affronts would be to someone else, whether it be a slap in the face, a brick through a window, or feces smeared in a church. My entire life I have witnessed intangible vandalism of this sort -- both to myself and to others -- and it has enraged me, all the more so because my contemporaries act as if it doesn't matter. Civilization is built on a vision of ideals; the civilized man today is surrounded by barbarians who perceive nothing but what their senses convey. Hilariously, my discontent is what people view with confusion or suspicion, ignoring the society collapsing all around them (that is, until the collapse became physical, as mentioned in my earlier post).

A side effect of my worldview is that I often wind up advocating for causes that seem "unfair" or inconsistent, at least from the perspective of someone to whom ideals do not exist. Everyone else cares about the tangible outcome; I care about purity of process regardless of outcome. "Let justice be done or the heavens fall," the saying goes, and I fully agree. If doing the right thing creates havoc, so be it, for the ideal is more important and thus remains preserved. If you don't catch my drift, here are a few examples:

• I witness a close family member commit a crime. I am called to the witness stand and take an oath to tell the truth, and I am then asked what I saw. There are only two options: either remain silent and go to prison for contempt, or tell the unvarnished truth. Lying is not an option. For cold-blooded murder or other mala in se, I would talk, and I would expect no less from anyone testifying against me. For tax evasion, insider trading, or other mala prohibita, I would remain silent and face the consequences.

• Here's one that actually happened to me. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life and have no desire to, since I consider it a filthy habit and even potentially dangerous to standers-by. A man approaches me outside the gym and asks me to sign a petition for a smoking ban in restaurants and other businesses catering to the general public. While I would love a smoke-free environment wherever I go, I flatly refuse to sign, explaining that it's the business owner's right to decide whether to allow smoking on his property. If you don't like the smoke, be an adult and take your business elsewhere. The same goes for employees, who should look for work elsewhere if they dislike smoke.

• The Supreme Court strikes down a state law that caps damages in various types of civil lawsuits, ensuring that my work as a lawyer (for the defense or the plaintiff, mind you) will remain far more valuable and thus profitable. I immediately denounce the decision as another abuse of the 14th Amendment and a further menace to the 10th Amendment that preserves state sovereignty over all matters not specifically delegated to the federal government, since I know that American liberty requires competition among many governments rather than occasional "wise" decisions handed down from a single, all-powerful one.

• A man files a lawsuit against a females-only gym, claiming gender discrimination of a type that many females have alleged in lawsuits against male-only businesses and institutions. Though I feel turnabout is fair play, I oppose the lawsuit because it likely again invites federal intervention into local matters, and also because of the basic principle that a property owner can exclude whomever she wishes.

• A homeowners' association fines a World War II veteran for flying the American flag in violation of the community's rules, and the veteran vows to fight back while gathering popular support from others in the community and around the entire nation. I deeply respect the veteran for his sacrifice and his patriotism, but I absolutely oppose him because he is going back on his word. Contracts are exercises of freedom, not infringements on them, and he chose to live by the very rules that he now seeks to evade. Cowing the homeowners' association into submission damages liberty far more than it preserves it.

El Fuego Del Alma

El fuego del alma jamás se extingue,
Aunque lo ahogues con maremoto, lo soples con remolino, o lo entierres en camposanto.
Es como la adivinanza de la esfinge,
Quien al enfrentarse con ese fuego indomable se lanzó del acantilado.
Ven, y arrójame lo que quieras.
El fuego arde ya.