“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel in the aftermath of the mortgage/financial/intervention-induced crisis of 2008. “It’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.”
The “important things” most politicians want to do usually involve more government controls. Post-crisis, they hurry to expand the state’s power over us before crisis-bred emotions like panic and anger can fade.
In doing so, they often blindly ignore relevant facts that even a little time for discussion would bring to light. That’s why Glenn Reynolds argues for a “Waiting period for laws, not guns” in a recent USA Today column.
Efforts to push legislation through while emotions are high mean that the legislation doesn’t get the kind of scrutiny that legislation is supposed to get. Laws are dangerous instruments, too, and legislators seem highly prone to sudden fits of hysteria.
Even New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg now says we must “start thinking a little bit more about the implications of things before we rush to legislate.” That’s “a bit rich” for Reynolds, since Bloomberg had PR men on standby to exploit the latest mass shooting as quickly as possible.
Still, if even Bloomberg is okay with hitting the pause button, “maybe the next time politicians want to rush a bill through without sufficient deliberation, others will have the fortitude to slow things down, read the bill and inform the public.”
This is not a pie-in-the-sky proposal. In many cities and states, today, an informed public can even petition a hastily enacted law onto the ballot for a referendum, at least when legislators don’t slap on a phony “emergency clause” to speed their worst enactments past the people.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Now, it must be evident, that, under this provision, together with their other powers, Congress could take such measures with respect to a militia, as to make a standing army necessary. Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.
Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.