(11-04-2018, 06:08 AM)Galen Wrote:(11-04-2018, 03:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-04-2018, 12:16 AM)Galen Wrote: I don't think he is capable of understanding these issues because they lead to conclusions that he does not like. He simply can't believe that governments tend to kill their own citizens. He believes that it can't happen here but the founding fathers had a rather different opinion which is reflected in their own actions and writings. In a very real sense the founding fathers would have agreed with Mao that political power grows out of a barrel of a gun and so they decided the people must be armed to insure that they held ultimate political power.
Pbrower missed rather more than half of the issue and seems to be heading to Eric the Obtuse levels of ignorance. From a strictly numbers point of view the garden variety criminal can't even begin to match the body count that governments routinely rack up. They simply refuse to consider the second and third order effects of policy choices.
I must admit that I really don't understand pbrower's obsession on dogs either.
Anyway, he follows the Jim Crow interpretation as much as you follow the Founding Father's. Understandable, as the Jim Crow interpretation was generally accepted for a century plus. I am biased about anything to do with Jim Crow. One must admit both Jim Crow and the Founding Fathers had political agendas. I just admire the Founding Father's agenda of rights to white males more than the Jim Crow agenda of denying rights to blacks. This is not to say that rights to only white males is not lacking.
The Jim Crow agenda was an unfortunate consequence, one of many, from the compromise of allowing slavery to continue after the American Revolution. I am not a big fan as you might imagine since involuntary servitude is not something libertarians are in favor of. This forms the basis of the libertarian view of taxation as theft.
The Founding Fathers on the whole, Alexander Hamilton is an exception, could be considered in modern terms to be Minarchist Libertarians. Murray Rothbard's Conceived In Libery covers this evolution toward individual liberty from Colonial Times to the early Federalist period. Their agenda was to create a government that was limited in power which was an unheard of idea in the eighteenth century.
Modern liberals and progressives are not and never have been in favor of individual liberty. The battle always has and always be between liberty and tyranny.
The Jim Crow heritage results from a hypocrisy characteristic of feudal times: freedom for the lords, but not for the peasants. In the feudal world the King was simply the biggest landlord, and the other nobles were lesser lords. The peasants were simply machines of meat as disposable as livestock. Taxation in medieval times was in kind -- the only production then available (largely foodstuffs) and the only commodity regularly available (peasant labor that could be drafted at will for the alleged good of him). Without a cash economy, as most people never saw even so much as a coin, taxation as we now understand it was impossible. Taxation came either from taking food off the peasant's table or compelling the peasant to perform service, especially in war. The peasant? If he thought his life precious and so asserted himself, he would be killed -- burning at the stake? impalement? A paradise for the lord of the manor and his privileged retainers was a Hell for the peasant.
With the abolition of slavery the slave proletariat became nominally free, but economically destitute among people who owned the property but needed toil. For a while the freedmen got some political power in the name of the Republican Party, but the reality that people must still eat and that power comes from a gun set in. Within ten years the freedmen were slaves of personal needs that they could meet only one way, in subjection to the landowning elite.
As Abraham Lincoln put it, as Carl Sandburg selected it, and as Aaron Copland set it in music in a tribute to Abraham Lincoln (A Lincoln Portrait) as the expression of another struggle against one of the most egregious forms of slavery to have ever existed:
Quote:Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country
It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy
That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth
America would do its share to 'disenthrall' Germany and Japan, whose leaders had brought a new form of egregious slavery upon free peoples.
No rapacious elite deserves unqualified power to take whatever it wants. Priests? Pharaohs? Kings? Emperors? Generals? Lords? Planters? Plutocrats? Party hacks? Executives? Mobsters? They have all showed themselves unsuited to such power. The libertarians are no more trustworthy in their efforts to find a rationale for a few people having complete power over the economy. It will take a Klan, a Cheka, or a Gestapo to establish the dystopia of a few people owning everything or controlling everything and making everyone else helpless. The first Pharaoh, Donald Trump, and Kim Jong-Un are more alike than they seem.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.