Wednesday, January 9, 2013

The Progressives "Long March" to Positive Law




It has become painfully obvious to me, that Conservatives are not prepared to meet our ideological foes head on in the field of ideas.  Sure, we have a few warriors out in the field – talk radio and the blogosphere, but our political leaders aren’t up to the task.  The Progressives liken themselves to Mao.  They’re on the “long march” to positive law.

The Statist goal is to obliterate our Constitution.  They’ve been whittling away at it for over a century.  Now, they’re smelling victory.  Their chance has come and they’re going to take it.  

Marxist professors and newspaper editors have called for an outright repeal of the Constitution.  Our politicians dismiss it completely.  President Barack Obama implements laws by circumventing Congress.  The Senate originates spending bills, when the Constitution specifically mandates that responsibility to the House.  And now, the Democrats are encouraging the president to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling by implementing the 14th Amendment, when it’s quite obvious that the clause referenced was to be used only for Civil War debt, not by irresponsible politicians a century and a half later.

And now they’re coming after our rights.  The Democrats are using tragedy and passions to capitalize on the fears of others.  The goal of the statist is to disarm the citizenry, and from there they can inflict their “positive law” without fear of rebellion.
   
[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. – John Adams

Our founding was revolutionary, not just in war, but ideas.  The belief in individualism and self-government is pervasive in their writings and deeds.  Natural Rights and Natural Law are paramount; positive law shunned and despised.  Here are a couple of excerpts from Murray Rothbard’s Introduction to Natural Law:
    
It was, in contrast, the Levellers and particularly John Locke in seventeenth-century England who transformed classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological and hence political individualism. From the Lockean emphasis on the individual as the unit of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts, stemmed his conception of natural law in politics as establishing the natural rights of each individual. It was the Lockean individualist tradition that profoundly influenced the later American revolutionaries and the dominant tradition of libertarian political thought in the revolutionary new nation. It is this tradition of natural-rights libertarianism upon which the present volume attempts to build.
 If, as we have seen, natural law is essentially a revolutionary theory, then so a fortiori is its individualist, natural-rights branch. As the nineteenth-century American natural-rights theorist Elisha P. Hurlbut put it:
 The laws shall be merely declaratory of natural rights and natural wrongs, and … whatever is indifferent to the laws of nature shall be left unnoticed by human legislation … and legal tyranny arises whenever there is a departure from this simple principle.[50]

A notable example of the revolutionary use of natural rights is, of course, the American Revolution, which was grounded in a radically revolutionary development of Lockean theory during the eighteenth century.[51] The famous words of the Declaration of Independence, as Jefferson himself made clear, were enunciating nothing new, but were simply a brilliantly written distillation of the views held by the Americans of the day:
 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness [the more common triad at the lime was "Life, Liberty and Property"]. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish it.
 Particularly striking is the flaming prose of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, applying natural-rights theory in a revolutionary way to the question of slavery:
 The right to enjoy liberty is inalienable. … Every man has a right to his own body — to the products of his own labor — to the protection of law. … That all these laws which are now in force, admitting the right of slavery are, therefore, before God, utterly null and void … and therefore they ought instantly to be abrogated.[52]
 We shall be speaking throughout this work of "rights," in particular the rights of individuals to property in their persons and in material objects. But how do we define "rights"? "Right" has cogently and trenchantly been defined by Professor Sadowsky:
 When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use.
 Personal property, responsibility, and morality are an ambiguous concept to Progressives.  To them everything is a shade of gray; colored by positive law.



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