For the American founders majority rule was the problem. To prevent majority rule from becoming unjust they designed measures into our constitution. Do you agree rule by majority can be an issue? When might it be desirable to thwart majority rule?
Articles tagged as
Founders
Taken Care of or Do We Want Liberty
Do most of us want to be taken care of or do we want liberty? Most of us have an exaggerated and idealized picture of the past. We long for a return to times gone by. The reason isn’t because food was more plentiful or better quality. It isn’t because we were more free. There … Read more
Contrary to the Left, our Founders were anti-slavery.
Steve has covered Nike’s reversal of distributing their new Betsy Ross Flag draped sneakers simply on the say so of former 49’s quarterback and current SJW-in-residence’s say-so. Slavery he said. Gaslighting, I say. Two things are at play here: Continual attack on our history by the Left as being evil (and this should be forgotten … Read more
More thoughts on Republicans passing SB11
Grokster Susan has the list with the title of “All your water are belong to them….“; it is still GraniteGrok’s belief that the finger has been removed from the dike with respect to the right to private property concerning the water underneath one’s land and that this may well give the Taxaholics yet another revenue stream of taxing (you watch – 4% of income is a magic number) private wells and septic systems (either directly or via metering). Grokster Steve points out that the idea of New Hampshire-ites being taxed for the rainwater falling on their land has already been breached.
My concern, however, was with the evolving process of Legislators creating more and more “enabling legislation” that creates more opportunities for “UnDemocracy” – as Rich Lowry points out (reformatted, emphasis mine):
It is appropriate that the worst scandal of the Obama administration— the IRS targeting of conservatives — is a scandal of administrators and bureaucrats, of otherwise faceless people endowed with immense power over their fellow citizens and running free of serious oversight from elected officials.
They are the shock troops of the vast bureaucratic apparatus of the federal government. Its growth has been one of President Obama’s chief goals, and the one he has had the most success in achieving. He has greatly enhanced the reach and power of regulatory agencies that are an inherent offense against self-government, even when they aren’t enforcing the law in a biased way.
The administration’s corruption isn’t bags of cash or lies about interns; it is the distortion of our form of government by sidestepping democratic procedures and accountability and vesting authority in bureaucrats. The Administrative State…
Did uber-Obama confident put a pin into the Progressive ballon and made it go “Pop!”?
I know I keep harping on this but one of the main tenets of Progressivism is to bring about the Administrative State – a place in time where expert technocrats “guide” the rest of us through our lives. These are unelected, unaccountable, and most likely, unapproachable bureaucrats working in a centralized government situation sitting down to make sure that we all know our place in order to have “an ordered and efficient” government (‘the country as machine and we all know our Borg cog place in it”). Obama, more than any other President since FDR, has embraced and declared (“fundamentally transform the United States”) this to be his philosophy.
Expert technocrats – only experts will staff governments. That is the hallmark claim: “we know it all” – and as we have lately seen, it does have multiple uses. However, it is expected that the Administrative State, if it is to organize and run Society, is even “better” than Society? That’s why it was a Mtn Dew snort out the nose moment when I read this from David Axelrod, uber-confidant to Progressive Prez Obama, on why these mega-scandals are all happening at once and why it isn’t Obama’s fault:
“Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,”
Boggled, I was. Here it was – an uber-Progressive saying that “Government is too big to manage”. What an outstanding gaffe that undercuts the entire raison d’etre for Progressivism. In one sentence, Axlerod:
- says that the brightest President not only is NOT the Smartest President EVAH (peace be upon him) (see here, too)
- validates what Conservatives have been saying for years; Government, as Reagan (a Progressive’s arch-enemy) once said, is the problem
If something is too vast, it is too big to manage and certainly too big to manage properly. And if the Smartest President EVAH (peace be upon him) can’t manage it well, well, who could? Well, the Founders “have an app for that!”
Turkey Feathers and AR-15s
I’m so very tired of the intellectually empty argument from self-loathing (yet surprisingly haughty) Americans that “the Constitution was written by a bunch of dead, white, slave-owners” and that “the second amendment was written about muskets“.
Regarding the first of these two arguments: The Founders were the intellectual superstars of their time. Most of them were rigorously trained, from very early ages, in philosophy, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, writing, politics, religion, the Greek and Latin languages, and economics. Many of them went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton (College of New Jersey), or Columbia (King’s College) as teenagers. Many of them could quote, from memory, Cicero, Plato, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, and others. They mastered these subjects, and were some of the most well-rounded individuals this country has seen, or ever will.
Thirty of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention were college graduates, all trained in similar fashion.
The point here is…
CPAC: Daniel Hannan (British MP) – on the unbridled optimism of American Conservatism for Liberty and Freedom
For a Brit, he would make a wonderful American Conservative. Given that the UK is well down the socialist road that Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Jeanne Shaheen (and the rest of the Progressive movement) wishes the US to follow, he sounds the alarm that this is a road that should not be well trod. … Read more