Monday, July 21, 2008

I'm tempted to put this first paragraph up on top

of the blog. L. Neil Smith says:
[I]t should be a major objective of any popular reform movement to abolish Sovereign Immunity, that ancient and highly evil custom under which "the King can do no wrong" and a supposedly democratic government has to give its permission to be sued.

Along with this reform, two others are called for. First, any law—including a portion of the Constitution—that shields politicians from crimes they commit in office must be struck down. And to those holdouts who maintain that if these things were done, the government would be buried in lawsuits and unable to "get anything done" (and this is bad because ... ?), you have but to adopt the "loser pays" rule in civil court, to diminish the number of "nuisance" suits that are filed.

There also needs to be a Penalty Clause written into the Bill of Rights.

The corporate equivalent of Sovereign Immunity is called "Limited Liability", a so-called "legal fiction" (English translation: a highly profitable lie, courtesy of the splendid legal profession) under which corporations are viewed and dealt with as individuals, the debts of their owners are limited to whatever they have invested in the corporation (this is exactly like fining a murderer only whatever he paid for the knife, skillet, monkey-wrench, or gun he used to kill somebody with), and the owners of corporations evade responsibility for the evil committed by, say, a Halliburton or a Blackwater USA. Without this change, while the politicians face war crimes trials, the directors and stockholders can sit back and watch the whole thing on TV.

Here's another fun quote, from Michael Rozeff at LewRockwell.com:
The notion of "We the People" hides a critical weakness in this political theory of Government, which otherwise is extremely attractive in its affirmation of a person’s rights and in its view of the derivative rights (or powers) of a Government. The theory leaves unanswered two questions. First, how do good People become a People? Second, how does a People provide its consent to a Government?

Shouldn’t they logically become a People in such a way as to maintain their primary rights? Shouldn’t they logically provide their consent to a Government while maintaining their primary rights? They should. Otherwise, the foundations of the theory are being contradicted.

And another, from Vin Suprynowicz:
[Y]our public school teacher had a fatal conflict of interest when he or she taught you "why we need to have a central state, with the power to shoot or jail people who don't pay up." I'll bet he or she never mentioned, as one of the reasons, "Because otherwise my paychecks would stop coming."

Be deeply suspicious therefore of most of the reasons you've been given for "why we need a central state." When stop signs are removed and speed limits raised or eliminated -- when people stop depending on the false assurance that such "rules" will bind the drunk and disorderly -- accident rates go down, not up (see John Staddon, in this month's Atlantic.) When more potential crime victims are "allowed" to carry concealed handguns, violent crime rates go down, not up (See John Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime.")

Feel free to extend this premise to most of the other reasons you've been told we "need" a powerful government regulating everything, most especially the notion that we "need" the guvgoons to jail hundreds of thousands of drug users. Nobody jailed them before 1914, and America was so safe that hardly anyone locked their doors.

No comments: