Thursday, June 24, 2004
sunnstein on my shoulder
guido has been getting flack for comparing bush to mussolini.
i'll go further - i'll compare sunstein to roosevelt.
this is a rant. feel free to cry godwin.
i'm feeling cranky. noisy neighbors, dental pain, can't sleep, i get irritable.
first, i'll critique roosevelt, then sunnstein.
the roosevelt dime, which used to be made of silver before lbj debased the currency, has roosevelt on one side, and the fasces on the other. the fasces are a bundle of rods symbolizing roman law - the law that killed jesus, slew the druids, but couldn't beat the scots. roosevelt, and his partner stalin, symbolize the twentieth century drive to totalitarianism. it would be too easy to criticize stalin, who was ne culturna, uncouth, naked aggression. roosevelt's brand of faces had better apologists, flacks, p.r. Sunstein is one such.
What chomsky calls the manufacture of consent.
first, the quote is nothing like a haiku - maybe he means koan.
second, roosevelt's big lie is the one sunstein repeats - that property rights do not exist until goverment chooses to dole them out. this view rejects the idea that we are endowed by our creator with certain rights, among which are life liberty and pursuit of happiness. in rejecting this foundation of organic law, the rooseveltists pulled off a coup, overthrowing american government, replacing it with a platform of social security and other planks straight from the communist manifesto.
third, roosevelt's communist four freedoms, an attempt at asserting positive rights, and thus undoing all negative rights, that is to say liberties, is not a 'second" bill of rights. the 1689 english bill of rights, incorporated into american common law, would be the first. that's where we get the right to bear arms, for example. then came the new hampshire bill of rights, followed soon by virginia. each state has one, and they are, if unknown and unenforced and routinely waived, much stronger than the better known federal bill of rights.
so not second but perhaps 49th or so. i get annoyed at taxpayer's bills of rights, arbi's customers bills of rights, yak-herders bills of rights, etc., that are little more than marketing documents, cheapening and debasing the idea of what a right is. rights are both legal claims, and gifts from god. roosevelt sought to dethrone god-given rights and replace them in his own image. sunstein worships this graven image. in the sunstein cosmos, government is allpowerful, all-knowing, and all good. only man's fallibility, in voting republican, can screw up this utopia.
a key insight, often missed, is that markets and ecologies work the same way.
ecologies did not wait for governments to enact them. any claim that law predates markets had better define its terms carefully, because i am sceptical.
now, i agree that rights should be evaluated by their consequences, although we should be humble in realizing our understanding of those consequences is very imperfect. consequential evaluation is a way to check your work and debug your program. indepentent auditors are needed, since there are powerful motives at work to game the system and rob the pension fund. that's one reason to opt for rule-utility over act-utilty. mill's on liberty spells out the rules pretty well.
(jim at vice squad and i cordially disagree about whether on liberty was written by harriet taylor mill.)
all for now.
guido has been getting flack for comparing bush to mussolini.
i'll go further - i'll compare sunstein to roosevelt.
this is a rant. feel free to cry godwin.
i'm feeling cranky. noisy neighbors, dental pain, can't sleep, i get irritable.
first, i'll critique roosevelt, then sunnstein.
the roosevelt dime, which used to be made of silver before lbj debased the currency, has roosevelt on one side, and the fasces on the other. the fasces are a bundle of rods symbolizing roman law - the law that killed jesus, slew the druids, but couldn't beat the scots. roosevelt, and his partner stalin, symbolize the twentieth century drive to totalitarianism. it would be too easy to criticize stalin, who was ne culturna, uncouth, naked aggression. roosevelt's brand of faces had better apologists, flacks, p.r. Sunstein is one such.
What chomsky calls the manufacture of consent.
first, the quote is nothing like a haiku - maybe he means koan.
second, roosevelt's big lie is the one sunstein repeats - that property rights do not exist until goverment chooses to dole them out. this view rejects the idea that we are endowed by our creator with certain rights, among which are life liberty and pursuit of happiness. in rejecting this foundation of organic law, the rooseveltists pulled off a coup, overthrowing american government, replacing it with a platform of social security and other planks straight from the communist manifesto.
third, roosevelt's communist four freedoms, an attempt at asserting positive rights, and thus undoing all negative rights, that is to say liberties, is not a 'second" bill of rights. the 1689 english bill of rights, incorporated into american common law, would be the first. that's where we get the right to bear arms, for example. then came the new hampshire bill of rights, followed soon by virginia. each state has one, and they are, if unknown and unenforced and routinely waived, much stronger than the better known federal bill of rights.
so not second but perhaps 49th or so. i get annoyed at taxpayer's bills of rights, arbi's customers bills of rights, yak-herders bills of rights, etc., that are little more than marketing documents, cheapening and debasing the idea of what a right is. rights are both legal claims, and gifts from god. roosevelt sought to dethrone god-given rights and replace them in his own image. sunstein worships this graven image. in the sunstein cosmos, government is allpowerful, all-knowing, and all good. only man's fallibility, in voting republican, can screw up this utopia.
a key insight, often missed, is that markets and ecologies work the same way.
ecologies did not wait for governments to enact them. any claim that law predates markets had better define its terms carefully, because i am sceptical.
now, i agree that rights should be evaluated by their consequences, although we should be humble in realizing our understanding of those consequences is very imperfect. consequential evaluation is a way to check your work and debug your program. indepentent auditors are needed, since there are powerful motives at work to game the system and rob the pension fund. that's one reason to opt for rule-utility over act-utilty. mill's on liberty spells out the rules pretty well.
(jim at vice squad and i cordially disagree about whether on liberty was written by harriet taylor mill.)
all for now.
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