We shall have lost something vital and beyond price on the day when the state denies us the right to resort to force…
Louis D. Brandeis quoted by Alfred Lief in The Brandeis Guide to the Modern World (1941), p. 212
Found at The Volokh Conspiracy
Tag: Leviathan
Quote of the Day – The Scum Also Rises Edition
Every combination of two or more human beings has both a useful aspect and a political aspect. These tend to conflict with each other. As the political aspect becomes more and more influential, the organization ceases to be useful to its members and starts using them.Why does this happen? Because the better an organization is at fulfilling its purpose, the more it attracts people who see the organization as an opportunity to advance themselves.The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them — apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, “The scum rises to the top.”Empire of the Rising Scum, Robert Shea
Found in a link in a comment to a post at Roberta’s that’s quite good in its own right. That’s just a taste. Read the whole thing.
Quote of the Day – RobertaX
I Wish I’d Written That
Via Improved Clinch, please take a few minutes and read Moral Communism at Counting Cats in Zanzibar. Excerpt:
If they try to communise the economy directly, there is an enormous body of “right wing” economic theory that can knock down their plans. So instead, they go for a two stage process. First of all, they persuade people that some Damned Thing is immoral. Then they show that the free market allows or encourages that immoral thing. Then they can say, “well, we wish we didn’t have to do this, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to intervene in that part of the economy, to stop the Damned Thing, sorry”. This leaves the free marketeer floundering around having to try to justify the continuance of the Damned Thing in the name of some nebulous “liberty”. And then they say, “so your selfish desire for “liberty” means this Damned Thing must go on?” and you lose the argument in public, because most of the audience have been persuaded that there is a moral crisis that must be addressed, and you are a heartless asshole who just doesn’t care.
RTWT. Seriously.
Dicta! It’s Just Dicta!
Obiter dictum (noun, Latin): An opinion voiced by a judge that has only incidental bearing on the case in question and is therefore not binding.
Where There’s a William makes a fascinating legal connection between two points brought up here: the finding that Obamacare is unconstitutional by United States District Court of Northern Florida the and the Seventh Circuit’s 1982 decision in Bowers v. DeVito that I excerpted as Quote of the Day a couple of days ago.
Will’s point is perfectly logical and rational, so of course it must be wrong! I can see the Left screaming that the Bowers declaration that
The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties; it tells the state to let people alone
is merely dicta, and not binding on any court.
Or, as Nancy Pelosi put it, “Are you serious? Are you serious?“
Edited to add:
No less a Constitutional scholar than our President, Barack Obama concurs with the court’s interpretation of the Constitution in Bowers:
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swfLonger excerpt available on YouTube.
If the Bush Administration Did This, There’d be Rioting
Sedition (noun): incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government.
Karl Denninger of Market-Ticker.org ruminates on the Obama administration’s reaction to the federal court decision finding Obamacare™©® unconstitutional. CBS reports:
The White House officials said that the ruling would not have an impact on implementation of the law, which is being phased in gradually. (The individual mandate, for example, does not begin until 2014.) They said that states cannot use the ruling as a basis to delay implementation in part because the ruling does not rest on “anything like a conventional Constitutional analysis.”
Regardless of whether that’s true or not, the fact remains that a decision has been handed down by a duly authorized court, and that ruling has force of law.
Denninger expounds:
So now we have a White House that has declared its intent to ignore a declaratory judgment.
The Administration has no right to do this.
Obama’s White House has exactly two options:
*Comply with the ruling. This means that any and all activity authorized or mandated by the Statute cease now.
*File an appeal and ask for a stay pending its hearing. If said stay is granted, then the ruling is held pending consideration.
That’s it.
Folks, this is clear.
And then he cites the relevant portion of the decision.
This is how “rule of law” works. But we’ve seen from the Holder Justice Department, the Obama administration believes there’s one rule for some groups, and different law for other groups. We’ve seen from the Sebelius HHS department that there’s one rule for most of us, and waivers for other groups. This is just an extension of the same mentality: “The law? The law doesn’t apply to us.”
Let me repeat the words of 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski from his dissent to the denial to re-hear the Silveria v. Lockyer case en banc:
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
With each passing day that contingency seems less and less improbable.
Hat tip to Weird and Pissed Off for the pointer. That’s two in a row.
The Pelt of My Wookie Suit is Not as Long or Luxuriant as
Tam’s, but I’m in full agreement with Mostly Cajun on this one:
I AM TJIC
UPDATE: There’s a BUNCH of us. And I’m late to the party (as usual),
This is One of the Most Difficult Things I Have Ever Watched
And it’s a prelude to tomorrow’s Quote of the Day. It’s about ninety minutes long. I knew bits and pieces of the information, but there was a lot I was completely unaware of, and I’ve never before seen all of it laid out in one continuous, historical timeline from Stalin to the present day.
The Soviet Story, 2008, found at Dr. Sanity
UPDATE: Blip.TV pulled the video. It’s available at Veoh.com for the time being, but you have to install their software to see the whole thing. Veoh allows you to watch just the first five minutes without doing that.
To Quote the Eminently Quotable Tamara K,
This would make me want to get my wookie on. This would make me want to saddle up and bust caps. If the .gov was wondering what it would take to turn me into a wild-eyed militia kook, well, they’ve found it.
She said this about the EPA looking at banning traditional lead ammunition, and I agreed with her then. I was reminded of that quotation when I read that European governments have started seizing private pension funds. Argentina did it a while ago.
There have been noises here about Congress looking longingly and lovingly at all of the money tied up in 401(k) retirement accounts. You see, the crash of the stock market proves that allowing people to control their own retirement accounts is just, well, foolish. We’d be much better off if we gave that money to the government for them to dole out to us in our old age like we do with Social Security.
Oh, wait…
So you want to seize my 401(k) funds? My wookie suit is fresh back from the cleaners, and I just cleaned the bowcaster.