Steve

Whose Life Is It Anyway?

This entry was posted in Government on by

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

This entry was posted in Law on by

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.

w Continues Support for Transportation Status Quo

This entry was posted in Transportation on by

w’s latest hyping of his energy plan appears to assume that cars are and should be our preferred mode of transportation:

President Bush, seeking to rev up support for his energy plan, praised domestic automakers Monday for building more “flexible fuel” vehicles capable of running on ethanol and biodiesel blends.
“That’s a major technological breakthrough for the country,” Bush said. “If you want to reduce gasoline usage like I believe we need to do so for national security reasons as well as for environmental concerns, the consumer has got to be in a position to make a rational choice.”

If you really want to reduce the use of oil, etc., a good place for w and the rest of us to start will be eliminating the ongoing federal and state subsidization of the automobile industry and, yes, any other transportation sector. Make sure the cost, including ongoing maintenance, of every new road, etc., is borne locally and most appropriately by the users.
One effect should be fewer roads built.
Another could be decisions to close roads.
For example, the latter is something that every city should be doing in its core right now. Even if it is as little as close one city block a year per city to automobile traffic the cumulative effect in terms of reduced miles driven can be huge. Over time the benefit in terms of increased human interaction and the possible development of profitable mass transit will be even greater than the ongoing reduction in noxious emissions.

Remember, too, that the ongoing subsidization of the automobile industry includes more than 40,000 deaths per year!