Daily Archives: March 27, 2007


Whose Life Is It Anyway?

There should be no question but that it is yours!
There are, though, plenty out there who believe otherwise:

At the colloquium, food and drug lawyer Richard Cooper agreed that the issue is whether some rights are so fundamental that we do not entrust them to decisions made by elected officials. Until recently, establishing agencies to regulate the safety and efficacy of drugs was thought to be within the purview of Congress. “I doubt that most people thought that they had a constitutional right to buy investigational drugs,” said Cooper. “It’s a wholly new, unheard of right with no antecedents in Anglo-American law.”

Dear mr cooper,
Free people have a right to make voluntary purchases from willing sellers. No federal, state or local legislation can change this fact. All they can do is use an illegitimate power to thwart our right to engage in voluntary exchanges.
People also have the right to toss out any government that abrogates their rights.
Sincerely,
Your Employers

Via.


Toss gonzalez Out Along With Some Other Detritus

In his exposition on how alberto gonzalez has made a mountain out of his own mole hill Charles Krauthammer explains why the executive branch might set enforcement priorities for its U.S. attorneys:

But the fact is that there are thousands of laws on the books and only finite resources for any prosecutor to deploy, which means that one must have priorities about which laws to emphasize and which crimes to preferentially pursue.
Those decisions are essentially political. And they are decided by elections in which both parties spell out very clearly their law enforcement priorities.

Herein lies one of the real problems of 21st century America. We do not live under the rule of law but of legislation pretending to be law. Laws to be meaningful must be knowable by and understandable to those who must follow them.
With thousands, hell-likely 10s of thousands of laws on the federal, state and local books we can hardly know them all. As to understanding them, pshaw…
Yes, gonzalez should step down.
Congress, though, would do better by us if it spent its time this session and in future sessions eliminating legislation and rewriting what must be kept until such time as the federal code is readable by and understandable to the average citizen.
When these and a few other conditions have been met* we may be able to say that we live under the rule of law. Yes, lawyers will still be needed but large numbers of them will be able to move on to productive work.

*See Randy Barnett, The Structure of Liberty, 84-107.