Latest Reader Question (January 7, 2018)

Here is the latest reader question, along with my reply:

Tom asks: Your article on the Constitution was posted on Rumormillnews.com. My interest is how to revise it so it can’t be ignored or abused given modern circumstances, to protect against Tyranny. After bad actors are arrested, how to prevent new generation of same. Do you know of a source of proposed amendments or a group that discusses these. I have ideas but they are unconventional so in a totally public forum they are of course unpopular. Also what do you think of the 2004-2010 Lincoln Town Car.

My reply: I’d rather replace it, given the whole thing is designed to create a “vigorous” central government (Hamilton’s words) and (per my article) does not concede – italicized for emphasis – the rights of individuals, which may not be violated in any degree absent (a) the specific consent of the individual or (b) some tangible harm caused by the individual, which justifies it in order to make whole those he has harmed.

The Articles of Confederation at least tried to dissipate political power, which served to protect the rights of individual people. If the state you lived in was tyrannical, you could move to an adjacent state that was less so. The Constitution consolidated power in a federal government, which turned the states into literally nothing more than administrative gaus (in the German sense) of the federal/central government.

Fundamentally, the issue is about clarity. “The people” is a shuck and jive. It is the means by which some people acquire power over others, by pretending to act in their name – even though they manifestly do not and even when this is made plain by the clear objection of those who reject such action and complain – rightly – that their consent was never obtained.

Only individual people have rights, not rhetorical abstractions – and not groups of people, either.

Therefore, the solution – or a step in the direction of one – is to dissipate the shuck and jive, refocus attention on our individual rights, on their inviolability – absent some harm caused to others by an individual or with the consent of the affected individual.

Put another way, it is collectivism and its handmaiden, coercion – which are the enemies and the way to beat them is to use the moral sense that most people already have, even if they do not apply it consistently. The person – which is most people – who would not commit murder or even steal (whether it was “legal” or “illegal”) is a prime candidate to be persuaded that taxes are immoral because they are in fact theft, the fact of the thing obscured on purpose by calling it “taxation.”

That would be a start, at any rate!

On the Town Car: It is one of my favorites; a full-size, rear-drive/V8-powered American luxury car of the type that was once common but which is becoming extinct. If you have one, keep it. If you are considering buying one – do it!

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