JamesMadison – ILANA MERCER

The Con-stitution And The Power To Confiscate

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 19:47:26 +0000

Bolstered by the U S. Forest Service, Summit County authorities, in Colo., are scheming on seizing 10 acres of verdant land that belongs to Andy and Ceil Barrie.

The parcel of land is situated within the White River National Forest. The authorities claim the couple’s use of a motorized vehicle on the preserved land risks “damaging the alpine tundra and streams and the habitat of the endangered lynx.”

Since it is the nature of government to “turn a wormhole into a loophole,” the solution sought by the county’s commissioners and attorney general is to confiscate private property under the guise of “open-space” conservation. On their side—and against the right of private property—the knaves of this Colorado county have a thing even more formidable than the U S. Forest Service: the U. S. Constitution.

Or, dare I say the Con-stitution?

Any discussion about the plight of the Barrie couple must be prefaced by noting the following:

There is no dispute as to the right of government grandees to grab private property. What remains of some dispute is whether the county has exceeded its authority to steal. For the Constitution gives authorities the right to seize private property for the “common good—that catch-all constitutional concept. Has not the General Welfare Clause, in Article I, authorized all three branches of colluding quislings to do just about anything which in their judgment will tend to provide for the general welfare?

The term for state-sanctioned theft of private property is “eminent domain.” A section of The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution reads as follows: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Understand: Compensating the individual if and when government confiscates his land for the ostensible greater good: that is not what’s so wicked here. Rather, it is that implicit in the Bill-of-Rights clause mandating “just compensation” is the acknowledgement that government has the right to confiscate private property, in the first place.

Legal experts are agreed that when it comes to eminent domain, “The ambit of national powers is wide–ranging,” as the Legal Information Institute puts it:

[Eminent domain] is a tacit recognition of a preexisting power to take private property for public use, rather than a grant of new power.” Eminent domain “appertains to every independent government. It requires no constitutional recognition; it is an attribute of sovereignty.” … the Court [has] affirmed that the power was as necessary to the existence of the National Government as it was to the existence of any State.

The Anti-Federalists forewarned early Americans of the “ropes and chains of consolidation,” inherent in the new, proposed Constitution.

Eminent domain is one example of the slow and surreptitious leap from the freedom of a loose confederation of sovereign states—”a league of friendship”—to the “ropes and chains” of a unified state.

True, too, is that the Anti-Federalists gave us the Bill of Rights. Without their insistence on instantiating individual liberties in the Constitution, we’d be bereft of the protections afforded by the first ten amendments appended to the U. S. Constitution. Instead, property taken in “the pressing urgencies of government,” the words, circa 1787, of an anti-Federalist named “Federal Farmer”—would be removed willy-nilly and without compensation.

Thus, while the Anti-Federalists deserve our gratitude for forestalling a measure of tyranny, these unsung heroes of the American founding must not be blamed for the defensive clause in The Fifth, stipulating “the right to receive just compensation when the government takes private property for public use.” The Anti-Federalists did not write the thing; Federalist James Madison was the one who introduced the amendments to the First United States Congress as a series of legislative articles.

Like a rattlesnake in winter hibernation, “the federal power of eminent domain lay dormant in the early years of the nation. It was not until 1876 that its existence was recognized by the Supreme Court.”

Nevertheless, it is hardly incorrect to say that before 1791, the time of ratification by the states, Americans owned the property they had homesteaded. After ratification, not so much.

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DEMOCRATIC DESPOTISM

Ilana Mercer — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Inundated from early childhood with government propaganda in public schools and educational institutions by legions of publicly certified intellectual, most people mindlessly accept and repeat nonsense such as that democracy is self-rule and government is of, by, and for the people ~Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy, The God That Failed

Democracy is optimized in spheres where the state is most active. Since natural inequalities are part of the human condition, egalitarianism requires concerted acts of government force. Democratic social structure is a product of the systematic use of political power. In as much as democracy’s aim is the achievement of equality, it is inimical to liberty ~ilana

James Madison was not a democrat. He denounced popular rule as “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Democracy, he observed, must be confined to a “small spot” (like Athens). Indeed, the Bush administration’s deafening demagoguery notwithstanding, democratic majoritarianism is thoroughly un-American.

Madison and the other founders attempted to forestall democracy by devising a republic, the hallmark of which was the preservation of individual liberty. To that end, they restricted the federal government to a handful of enumerated powers. Decentralization, devolution of authority, and the restrictions on government imposed by a Bill of Rights were to ensure that few issues were left to the adjudication of a national majority.

The essence of democracy, instantiated so perfectly in Bush’s neoconservative administration, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will,” a “national purpose” that ought to be implemented by an all-powerful state. Voltaire, a rather cleverer Frenchman, said that Rousseau is as to the philosopher as the ape is to man. Still, that ape’s idea animated the blood-drenched French and Russian revolutions. And sadly, it wafted over the Atlantic, took root in the republic’s soil, and flourished like kudzu.

Over time, this foreign weed began to choke the Founder’s Republic. As Felix Morley observed in Freedom and Federalism, earlier Americans were undeniably influenced by Rousseau, harboring a considerable admiration for the manner in which the common democratic will found expression in revolutionary France. The later infestation of Marxist ideas completed Rousseau’s work.

Were America still a republic, liberty would be guaranteed regardless of whom is elected on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November: the shifty-eyed Ewok (Bush) or the Wizard of Oz Scarecrow (Kerry). In democratic America, however, either of these demiurges will enjoy almost unlimited power. Marriage, marijuana, Microsoft, you name it — there is hardly an aspect of life from which these meddlers are barred. All are subject to the whims of the national majority, or, rather, of its ostensible representatives.

It is these representatives who triumph in this or any election, certainly not that fictitious entity “The People.” While it seems obvious that the minority in a democracy is openly thwarted, the question is, do the elected representatives at least carry out the will of the majority?

The answer is No. The People’s representatives have carte blanche to do exactly as they please. As Benjamin Barber has written:

It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends. Politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians.

In Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy E. Barnett further homes in on why the informed voter has little incentive to exercise his “democratic right”:

If we vote for a candidate and she wins, we have consented to the laws she votes for, but we have also consented to the laws she has voted against.

If we vote against the candidate and she wins, we have consented to the laws she votes for or against.

And if we do not vote at all,
we have consented to the outcome of the process whatever it may be.

This “rigged contest” Barnett describes as, “‘Heads’ you consent, ‘tails’ you consent, ‘didn’t flip the coin,’ guess what? You consent as well.'”

The Supreme Court-mediated election of 2000 has resulted in a close examination of the mechanics of voting (electronic machines vs. chads — hanging or pregnant). The democratic myth has remained undisturbed. Not so in Norway, which has taken the lead in examining the mechanics of the system. Ascribe it, perhaps, to the capacity for radical self-knowledge bequeathed by Ibsen, but for whatever reason, the Norwegian Study of Power and Democracy (NSPD) is one of the most comprehensive inquiries ever undertaken in the social sciences.

The NSPD’s brief was to trace the chain of command that supposedly ensures politicians enact the will of the people. To say that the study raises grave reservations about the rule of the many — the demos — would be an understatement. It concludes, “A structure of links between the people and their representatives is falling apart, and what remains is the people on one side of the field, their representatives on the other side, and a void between them.” Far from being free from the “grave defects and irrationalities” that characterized “earlier forms of government,” as Francis Fukuyama rhapsodized, the NSPD found that democracy is riddled with them.

These gloomy findings are surprising (to some, at least). Norway has all the attributes necessary for an ideal democracy. It is small, Western, homogeneous (although this is changing), stable and rich. Yet Norwegian membership in political parties declines precipitously. Moreover, the politically active grow progressively more alienated. The populist (anti-statist, anti-immigration) Progress Party won 21 percent of the vote in 2001. This, coupled with Norway’s decision to reject the European Union, suggests a simmering and underestimated particularism and nationalism.

In Norway, one of the first casualties of the illiberal centralization of power characteristic of democracy has been the loss of local autonomy. Much like the states in the American republican scheme, Norway’s 400 or so municipalities once commanded considerable responsibilities and powers. No longer. Municipalities have been stripped of their powers while, at the same time, being saddled with ever-increasing responsibilities. As Stein Ringen commented of the NSPD study in the Times Literary Supplement, “There is less power in local government because central government has usurped it.”

The parallels with democratic America are obvious. To give one egregious example, by federal fiat, American state schools and hospitals for instance, must bear the costs of teaching and treating illegal aliens but cannot expel them because of federally granted rights.

Autonomy does not stop flowing upward once it has reached Oslo. Norwegian sovereignty is constrained by the EU and its burgeoning jurisdiction, and by international covenants and bodies such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. Under the crag of global government, however, lies a perfectly constitutional transfer of powers. Article 93 of Norway’s (democratic) Constitution allows the Norwegian government to place Norwegians under the control of the EU and its democratically deficient European Commission, the latter not subjected to limits imposed by the Storting (the Norwegian parliament) or the courts.

Washington, like Oslo, may also cede the rights of Americans to global governors. Specifically, the “Supremacy Clause” in Article VI of the Constitution states that all treaties made by the federal government shall be “the supreme Law of the Land,” and shall usurp state law. True, judicial review was to curb congress and restrain the executive. Alas, the federal trinity — the judicial, legislative, and executive — has simply formed an unholy alliance in sundering the 10th Amendment. Restoring the people’s “unalienable rights” may well lie in Jeffersonian interposition and nullification, whereby states beat back the federal occupier by voiding unconstitutional federal laws.

As ethicist Tibor Machan reminds us, “The task of political theory is, in part, to identify those areas of public life that should be subject to democratic decision making and those that should be permanently and irremediably exempt from it.” Yet doctrinaire democrats don’t seem to give a tinker’s toss about placing limits on what a legislature (local or global) can divvy or decide. If Americans have confined their critique of democracy to the “Lucky-7 Lottery” flavor of the Florida electoral fracas, the Norwegians’ quarrel is purely with the unelected nature of their usurpers. Nowhere in the NSPD’s proposed solutions is the suggestion that assorted supranational structures be dismantled or their powers drastically curtailed. Loss of sovereignty per se is not what vexes, but rather the shortage of ballots. Clearly, Norwegian insights go only so far.

But the true mandate of democracy, openly affirmed by the NSPD, and in the promises made by the Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber of the American presidential race, is to enforce egalitarianism. Good democracy is said to be commensurate with class, wealth, and occupational convergence. The Norwegian scholars lament that less-than-perfect democracy has been achieved in Norwegian private life, where women and minorities have failed to achieve aggregate economic parity. Although when it comes to their presence in education, political life, and public-sector employment, politically imposed affirmative action and quotas have done the trick. In other words, democracy is optimized in spheres where the state is most active. Since natural inequalities are part of the human condition, egalitarianism requires concerted acts of government force. Democratic social structure is a product of the systematic use of political power. In as much as democracy’s aim is the achievement of equality, it is inimical to liberty.

So we see that the road to serfdom — in both Norway and America — is no coincidental detour, but rather a well-charted destiny. As Hans-Herman Hoppe has observed, the failure of democracy is rooted in its very nature. Coercive majoritarianism, nominal ownership of property, a highly centralized and authoritarian state with ever-expanding distributive and other powers, over whose decisions “The People” exert little control — these have inevitable consequences.

The Founding Fathers warned against this. But instead of Madison, we chose to follow that ape, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

©By ILANA MERCER
Ludwig von Mises Institute
September 16, 2004

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BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 00:00:00 +0000

The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for ‘the degeneracy of manner and morals,’ which James Madison warned war would bring ~ilana

The chattering classes are doing what they do best, and that is to shed darkness wherever they go. This column informed readers about the Niger lie in March 2003, after Muhammad ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, unceremoniously and politely called the allegation that Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa “inauthentic.” It’ll take the mainstream media a few years to work out, but many in the administration (not least Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney) had been sitting on this intelligence since February 2002, when a diplomat called Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA and the State Department to ferret it out.

Members of the media aren’t capable of much more than fragmenting and atomizing information. Integrating facts into a conceptual understanding is certainly not what Howard Fineman, Chris Matthew’s anointed analyst, and the brain trust on MSNBC’s “Hardball” does. To disguise his pedestrian politicking, Fineman discussed who, at what time in the afternoon, as well as when in the estrus cycle of the next door cow, did an official put the infamous 16 words about nukes and Niger on the president’s desk. That ought to make a nation already bogged down in concrete bits of disconnected data see the forest for the trees, wouldn’t you say?

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.

But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you? Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for “the degeneracy of manner and morals” which James Madison warned war would bring—the same “bring ’em on” grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

Hold the CIA responsible for giving in to the War Party’s pressure, if you will. But recognize that the CIA was only obeying the wishes of its masters. The CIA had attempted to resist. Witness the early statements by Vince Cannistraro, former counterterrorism chief, who scoffed at the concoction of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection. Having come under fire after September 11, the agency gave in to White House pressure to politicize and shape the lackluster information.

Unforgivable? Yes. But consider who the intelligence community takes its corrupt cues from. Perhaps New Jersey’s poet laureate Amiri Baraka had a point when he wondered, “Who know [sic] what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza.” The National Security Adviser has since September 11 been rocking the intelligence community with her antipathy to the truth. As if her Saddam-seeded nuclear-winter forecasts were not bad enough, on September 8, 2002, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs.” “That’s just a lie,” an appalled David Albright of the Institution for Science and International Security told the New Republic.

In her latest damage control interview with Blitzer, Rice continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was threatening his neighbors when the president pounced, and, as justification for the war, she still makes reference to Saddam’s effort to pursue a nuclear program in … 1991, and to the burying of old centrifuge parts prior to the first Gulf War. Rice, of course, continues to deny the Niger forgery.

Clearly, Whitehall and Washington will not willingly give up their dark secrets. With few exceptions, such as U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd; Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich; John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee; and Bob Graham of Florida, the utterly disposable and detestable Democrats have been only too pleased to aid and abet this (heritable) executive dictatorship.

And the media will continue to do what their collective intelligence permits: focus only on the one lie, thus making the lattice more impenetrable.

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DEMOCRACY IS FOR THE DOGS

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 06 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

A succinct distinction between a republic and a democracy shows that the American republic rests in peace and that voting in the Unites States is undeniably democratic, not republican. In Does Democracy Promote Peace, legal scholar James Ostrowski does just that:

Democracy is nothing more than the numerous and their manipulators bullying the less numerous. It is an elaborate and deceptive rationalization for the strong in numbers to impose their will on the electorally weak by means of centralized state coercion …
Both forms of government feature voting by the people to select officials. The primary difference between them is that while republican voting is done for the purpose of choosing officials to administer the government in the pursuit of its narrowly defined functions, democratic voting is done, not only to select officials but also to determine the functions and goals and powers of the government.
The guiding principle of republics is that they exercise narrow powers delegated to them by the people, who themselves, as individuals, possess such powers.

The allusion to “narrow powers” is far removed from the realities of the American social democracy, particularly in light of the welter of new powers Washington has grabbed since September 11. With the governed in the U.S. exerting so few controls over those doing the governing, the original notion of the people having the same powers as their elected officials strikes one as positively quaint.

The powers available to power wielders in a democracy are, by definition, exceedingly broad and broaden with almost every bit of legislation passed. That we were once a republic and are now a social democracy makes clear that the Constitution has not halted this progression. The Constitution has, for all intents and purposes, been destroyed.

“The process of mutilation” Frank Chodorov dated to the Jackson Administration, but put the Constitution’s final expiration down to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment. “The income tax,” wrote Chodorov in Imperium in Imperio, “insinuated a theory of government quite unknown to the Founding Fathers, holding that the function of government is to act as pater familias to society as a whole. To perform that role, the government must have access to all that is produced, as a matter of right, just as a feudal baron might lay claim to the fruits of his vassals’ labor.”

Successive Supreme Courts have contributed to the “mutilation” by interpreting the Constitution so that it no longer reflects the eternal verities the Founders spoke to, but the prevailing egalitarian redistributionist credo.

With natural rights being held hostage to the “greater good,” the vote in a democracy is not to select people who would protect the inviolability of the rights the Founders wanted to instantiate—the right to life, liberty and property. At best, the vote in a democracy is a toss-up between a candidate who would loot for welfare and the candidate whose preference is to pillage for warfare.

The one fellow will ransack the taxpayer in order to secure prescription medication for those who think their health is the collective’s responsibility; the other ‘virtuous’ chap thinks nothing of a shakedown in the cause of imposing democracy on far-flung nations, never with their democratic consent.

The vote in a democracy is about the coerced distribution James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, eschewed in his 1792 disquisition on Property: “What a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken from him without his consent.”

In a democracy, “even the individuals who voted and who managed to pick a winner are not actually ruling themselves in any sense of the word,” say Linda and Morris Tannehill. They voted for a man, not for the specific laws that govern them.” And the laws that man and his faceless bureaucracy usher in have their own momentum.

Who among the traditional support base of George Bush would have foreseen his plumping for protectionist policies for the steel, softwood lumber and agriculture industries? Or for legislation like the McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulation bill? Who would have predicted his newfound dedication to rights infringing anti-discrimination laws, not least the support for gender-based quotas in college athletics? All of these reflect presidential pandering in a democracy to the real constituency: the special interest group.

This voracious voter forms the largest and most powerful constituency. He is the backbone of the system, and possesses the greatest political pull, because the tax burden in a democracy rests on a minority. The majority of taxpayers in the modern-day social democracy pay very little tax but receive myriad government benefits anyway.

Oddly enough, conservatives continue to stubbornly associate Republican candidates with the no-longer extant republican principles, believing that systemic ills can be remedied at the ballot box: Get the right—Republican—guy in and all will be swell.

Their confusion is understandable. Republicans are the drag queens of politics. While the Democrat is open about his devilishness—he finds the idea of a constitutional government with narrowly delimited powers as repellent as Dracula finds garlic—modern-day conservatives are subtle about their aversion to a Jeffersonian republic.

Peel away the pules for family, faith and fetuses and one discovers either, what economist and political philosopher Hans-Hermann-Hoppe calls “neoconservative welfare-warfare statists and global social democrats”—Or, conversely, national socialists of sorts, who fuse economic protectionism, populism and support for the very welfare infrastructure which is at the root of the social rot they decry.

In a word, the social democratic bona fides of the Republican are beyond reproach. “Contrary to popular myth,” demurs Ostrowski, “every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government’s size, scope or power—and usually all three. Include regulations and foreign policy, as well as budgets approved by a Republican Congress, and a picture begins to emerge of the Republican Party as a reliable engine of government growth.”

Mr. Bush has certainly earned his Great Society Democrat credentials.

Ultimately, the vote in a democracy is for the social democrat who thinks nothing of mob rule as a moral philosophy. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn almost got it right when he said, “Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic.” Correction: All that can be achieved with only 51 percent of the vote, making the slogan “freedom begins at the ballot box” a very cruel hoax indeed.

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