Here I am, finding myself saying something about the Constitution again, despite it being a weak document, wholly inappropriate for its purpose, for it clearly says the government can't do this or that, and when the government goes ahead and does this or that anyway, it remains wholly mute on the subject. One may argue that the Founding Fathers, having just been involved in a little spat with the Redcoats, couldn't fathom a situation in which the majority of Americans would merely continue to slog on day after day, while abuses occur with ever increasing abandon. Perhaps they should have hired an illustrator and graphically displayed what to do with violators.
It is a hard point to concede that it might be legitimately unforeseen, since the milieu into which I was born was one of consistent violation, and it seems incredible myopic. But then, they had not foreseen that most uncivil war in the States, nor the two world wars- I suspect the Founding Fathers would have found all of these quite troubling, and since a least a few of them were familiar with breeding, they might have understood the devastating effects.
And yet, for all it's flaws, the Constitution is useful after a fashion. We must move on, yet as we continue under the current charade it is useful to determine the criminal. It is useful for understanding who deserves justice. The damage done should be rectified.
I was thinking last night, given that there are all these whispers of open season on whites, that a decent state ought to tax anti-gun nuts, and use that money to counter-act the costs imposed upon us by the federal government. The anti-gun nuts violate our rights using the government. They are guilty. We deserve more than just the plain language of the constitution- which we should not even have to fight for- but also restitution for preventing us from exercising our rights, and the damn time it takes to bother with any of this stuff. And give me the incandescent light bulb back.
Of course, states don't tend to be decent- my state likes to pretend gambling isn't gambling, because gambling is against the state constitution. So we call it gaming in legalese and gambling in the normal world. When the Federal courts do something good, and limit the state's ability to tax or regulate in anyway, the states hire creative people to come up with completely new language in order to achieve whatever it was they were trying to do in the first place.
So, we basically need to have constant court battles year after year on the same exact issues, each costing millions of dollars, and zero expectation that we will actually be able to keep our freedoms anyway, because the judges get dumber every year, apparently.
Good governance is only noticeable in its absence.
Bad governance is more boisterous than Trump, and eventually chokes out the producers upon which it relies for governance.
Bad governance is thuggery.
2 comments:
"Perhaps they should have hired an illustrator and graphically displayed what to do with violators."
I admit; I laughed.
You make a great many good points.
In its defense, the Constitution is one of the oldest founding documents in the world (most of the world's governments are post-colonial or post-Soviet creations,) so its position in the world is fairly unique. That the system has held up so far, as much as it has, is at least a point in its favor. If democracy may be thought of as two sides lining up their armies, taking a headcount, and then deciding the winner is the guy with the bigger army, then at least there's a certain efficiency involved.
But after 200+ years of continuous governance, the whole system becomes unwieldy; statute piles up on statute until no one even knows how many there are or what exactly is and isn't illegal. That becomes highly problematic; eventually the laws themselves become a tax on compliance. Those who can avoid compliance--by convincing legislators to give them exceptions, or working under the table, or by just not getting noticed--succeed at the expense of those who attempt to comply.
Every so often, the entire system needs to be scrubbed clean of the accretion of hundreds of years of old legislation, then the good parts simplified and condensed. This doesn't need to involve a revolution, just a dedication to occasionally keeping house.
Thanks, by the way, for your kind words.
You are welcome.
I used to think along these lines- scrubbing and/or codifying. Now I notice the correlation between writing and bureaucracy and wonder whether or not there is some way to return to some form of personal governance- with the people governing having incentives more similar to property owners. Incentives to improve things over the long term, rather than the incentives of a twelve year old with short term access to the cookie jar.
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