No man has a greater regard for the military gentlemen than I have. I admire their intrepidity, perseverance, and valour. But when once a standing army is established, in any country, the people lose their liberty.
Categories
Categories
George Mason
In all our associations; in all our agreements let us never lose sight of this fundamental maxim — that all power was originally lodged in, and consequently is derived from, the people.
Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings says it’s time to stop investigating the latest IRS shenanigans. According to him, closed-door interviews with IRS staffers prove that no White House or other Washington officials were involved in targeting the applications for tax-exempt status of conservative groups for special obstructionist attention.
Whew! Crisis over.
But the congressman is ignoring a few things.
For example, history. Everything we are now learning (visit TaxProf Blog for the latest news roundups) indicates that this latest shocking scandal only confirms what we already knew about the Internal Revenue Service. The outfit does not play nice. It is not animated by unwavering concern for truth, justice, and even-handed enforcement of its welter of wretched regulations.
More immediately, the congressman is ignoring the fact that the IRS’s ideological targeting is not resolvable into the actions of one or two frazzled clerks in Cincinnati. (Even if some reporters have valiantly striven to show, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, “How One Overworked IRS Worker Ignited the Tea-Party Targeting Scandal.”)
We know that many DC-based officials linked to the targeting of conservative groups quit, were transferred, or were put on administrative leave right after the scandal broke. We know that IRS employees in Cincinnati have testified that the DC office especially requested Tea Party files. We know that DC lawyers both reviewed the intrusive questionnaires sent to Tea Party groups and drafted many of the questions. Etc. All irrelevant?
Come on, Cummings.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
George Mason
I retired from public Business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice.
The ugly fact: our government is capturing all of our phone records. It reportedly is grabbing our credit card information, as well tracking us online. The latest “defense” of this practice? Such mined data’s no worse than the information we voluntarily provide Google or Facebook or other big, bad corporations.
This after-the-fact rationalization comes up short, however, missing that crucial “voluntary” aspect, whereby we get to choose what information we give to a corporation, including providing none at all. That’s not how the National Security Agency works. The NSA just grabs our information without our consent.
What other possible differences might there be?
There’s the crucial matter of degree, too. “The government possesses the ultimate executive power,” argued The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, author of Deep State, appearing on “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC. “I mean, it can jail you, it can detain you, it can kill you.”
“Even though the Obama campaign and Apple . . . know more about me than perhaps members of my family, and probably the government,” Ambinder added, “what the government can do with that information is much different than what a corporation can do. They can make me buy something or vote for someone; the government can imprison me.”
Mr. Ambinder is absolutely correct . . . except for his ridiculous statement that campaigns can “make” you vote for their candidate or that corporations can “make” you buy their products. The crucial difference is between the arts of persuasion (including tempting, cajoling, nudging) on the one hand, and sheer homicidal force coupled with kleptomaniacal thievery on the other.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The signatures are in: 16,199 of them — twice as many as needed to initiate the first recall election of a state lawmaker in Colorado history.
The target of voter ire? Senate President John Morse. He ticked off his El Paso County constituents by spearheading the recent triple whammy of gun control legislation that neatly bypassed Colorado voters earlier this year.
You may remember the controversy. The three bills in question, signed by the governor as emergency legislation so that no voter referendum was possible, elicited widespread negative reactions in the state, including nearly every county sheriff in Colorado publicly opposing the bills.
So, why did the sheriffs oppose the legislation, while Democrats in the legislature passed the bills?
Like state legislators, sheriffs are elected. But, unlike legislators, sheriffs deal with self-defending citizens qua citizens, as well as criminals and victims, on a regular basis. Such experience brings a different perspective, and makes sheriffs more skeptical of blunt legislative solutions.
Traditionally, Democrats — despite the fondness demonstrated by their party constituencies for increased government control over private weapons — tend to treat the issue of “gun control” with some modicum of care. At least, those in the mid-west and western states tend to.
But Senator Morse did not.
Morse won the senate seat back in 2010 by fewer than 350 votes, with a Libertarian Party candidate racking up 1,320 votes — almost 5 percent. Libertarians are strongly pro-Second Amendment. Yet, Morse treated his narrow victory as a call for sweeping change. A mandate!
He may reap the “reward” for such “courage.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
George Mason
Our All is at Stake, and the little Conveniencys and Comforts of Life, when set in Competition with our Liberty, ought to be rejected not with Reluctance but with Pleasure.
You don’t trust President Barack Obama?
No faith in the massive federal bureaucracy? Do you lack confidence in Congress representing your interests? How much do you trust the federal courts that handle secret requests from the Department of Justice . . .and then issue secret decisions based on the judge’s secret interpretation of the law?
Be advised: President Obama finds “your lack of faith disturbing.”
“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch, but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law,” Obama told reporters in response to the public uproar to a leak of classified information suggesting that the detailed phone records of every American have been seized by the National Security Agency, “then we’re going to have some problems here.”
Agreed. Problems galore. The morning paper reads like a dystopian novel.
Are we really supposed to feel protected by a federal judge in a secret court wherein only the government is represented?
Or represented by Congress, for goodness sake?! Only a few congressmen are told, and those sworn to secrecy.
The Obama Administration incredibly calls this set-up “an unprecedented degree of accountability and transparency.”
There are compelling national security interests, upon which our rights must be balanced, the president explains. But in our constitutional system, as I argued at Townhall.com yesterday, there is no more compelling national interest than that the government fully obey the Fourth Amendment — and the entire document, please.
Thank you.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Categories
John Hospers
People speak of “the public interest.” But what is the public interest? Strictly speaking, there is no such thing. There is only the interest of each individual human being. There are interests that many or all people share, but these are still the interests of individuals. When politicians say that something is “to the public interest,” they usually mean it serves the interests of some people but goes against the interests of others — and usually the interests of the people with the most political pull win out. Is it to the public interest for some to be forced to die so that others may be saved? Is it to the public interest for a hundred crazed men to lynch one man in the public square? Is it to the public interest for all the citizens of the nation to be taxed to pay for a federal dam in one section of it? In Sweden it takes a couple eight years on the average before they can obtain an apartment of their own (owned by the government, rented by them); but they are not supposed to complain, because “it’s in the public interest.” Just as there are only individual rights, so there are only individual interests.
Categories
John Hospers
By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments. The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments, that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity.