Yo-mentum: Unions bully Boccieri into flipping

crr6 on March 19, 2010 at 1:41 PM

Stick to your illusions about what I do.

venividivici on March 19, 2010 at 1:47 PM

Sorta OT, but since we’re talking about putting the Commerce Clause in the service of the Left’s moral agenda of increasing insurance coverage (well, that’s what they say, but anyone with eyes in their head can see it’s a power grab), here’s a good article on the rise of the Federal government and the epoch of a particular interpretation of the scope of their power.

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/april-2009/the-coming-of-the-fourth-american-republic

Most relevant passage:

Starting in the 1930s, the theoretical limitations on the authority of governments—national or state—to deal with economic or welfare issues were dissolved, and in the course of fighting for this untrammeled power governments eagerly accepted responsibility for the functioning of the economy and the popular welfare.

Like the primacy of federal over state sovereignty, the shift continued even after the watershed event. Remaining limits on governmental authority were eliminated by the dialectic of the civil rights revolution, in which the federal power over commerce was expanded to meet moral imperatives, and the new standards were then fed back into regulation of commerce.

He says later on:

We are in a crisis of legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy, the right to rule, is the single most important factor in political life. The particulars of how it is gained and lost are infinitely varied, according to the culture and history of the polity. In Monty Python’s “Holy Grail,” Dennis says to King Arthur: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” But indeed the Lady of the Lake can be sufficient, if that is what enough people think, and a proponent of the Divine Right of Kings would regard committing the decision to the votes of the people as ludicrous.

In the United States, legitimacy is conferred by elections, but it is not total. Through the ages, the basic question mark about democracy as a form of government has been that 51 percent of the electorate can band together to oppress the minority—“the tyranny of the majority” is a valid concern. To address it, the United States has a formal written Constitution to guarantee basic rights, but it also has an unwritten constitution that sets limits on how far the winners can push their victories. Exceed the amorphous bounds, and not only does the minority no longer accept the legitimacy of the government, many members of the majority coalition will have a guilty conscience as well, knowing that their acquiescence to the demands of one of their allies was a bad deed. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”

I’ll stick with Jefferson against crr6′s “slender majority” which would like to foist the “great innovation” of ObamaCare on me, based on some horsesh!t interpretation of “commerce”.

The end of the article is quite hopeful. Unfortunately, the basis for that hope is that since the “Special Interest State” is unsustainable, it will collapse in a flaming ruin.

venividivici on March 19, 2010 at 2:28 PM