Re: US GDP Grows 4% in Q2, Beating Expectations
I read a most interesting article recently that discussed this very topic. It started out by explaining what the intent of our Founders was in writing the Declaration of Independence, particularly the line "all men are created equal" and "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." In other words, there is a higher law than any human law.....
Not quite. They believed that humans have inherent rights, and that government ought to be restrained -- radical ideas in their time.
However, we should note that they also did not have anything resembling modern corporations as we do now. It would not have occurred to them that government would need to step in to restrain potential abuses by monopolies and multinational corporations. International finance, credit cards, mortgages, derivatives, trading financial products... all unimaginable to them.
That all began to change in the mid-1800s, with the coming of the socialist revolution, which swept the world....
"Socialism" does not mesh with the idea of limited government, but it is NOT incompatible with the idea of inherent rights. In fact, it's fairly easy to construct a socialist ideology based on protecting individuals, and treating them equally under the law.
By the early 1900s, socialism was well entrenched in the world's intellectual leadership, and one of its achievements was to create socialized school systems, which taught that the solution to any problem is more government.
Just to be clear, are you really implying that public schools are a bad thing, because they are "socialist?"
Higher Law was laughed at - they said our rights to our lives, freedom and property come from the government, and can be altered or abolished as politicians see fit. Very clever, indeed!
Not really. The real socialists (e.g. Marx, Engels) made no such claims. They were much more concerned with abuses by capitalist entities, and routinely viewed existing governments as servicing capitalist interests. (Marx didn't even articulate a post-revolutionary government, he only focused on the revolution itself.) Post-Marxian leaders like Lenin, Stalin or Mao viewed government as the best way to manage and distribute the means of production.
There is also the pesky problem that, well, rights probably aren't actually inherent. No one hands you a guarantee of rights when you're born. There is no uniform agreement on what rights are truly inherent, and no way to prove whether a particular right is or is not inherent. E.g. if the Christian deity bestowed freedom of religion and freedom of expression upon humanity, then why was that unrecognized for millennia prior to the ratification of the US Constitution? Why did this deity allow flagrant abuses of human rights for centuries, including deprivation of due process, and the routine use of torture to extract confessions? How does the concept of a warrant to search a home fit into an inherent right? Why were slaves excluded from all rights, until the US fought itself brutally over the matter? When did this deity deign to tell us that a "right to privacy" existed, and by what means? There certainly aren't any passages in the Jewish and Christian canons which outline an explicit list of inherent rights, so how do we know what's on the list? And of course, why would someone who is not Christian, or not religious, be bound by Christian concepts about rights? (We should note, by the way, that many secularists adhere to the concept of rights just as strongly as any religious individual.)
I.e. claiming that rights are "inherent" doesn't prove that is actually the case. Even invoking a religious basis doesn't actually justify any degree of certainty.
Small wonder that some would like vey much to abolish our Constitution - it's contrary to what they were taught in school! :thumbdown:
Actually, almost no one in the US wants to abolish the Constitution. Few want to alter it. Almost every political player in every political position in the US invokes a Constitutional basis for their actions. Thanks for the straw man, though.