Social Justice

 'Social justice' is also called 'distributive justice' by those who don't mind the word association problem. At least they are intellectually more honest than those who hide behind the word 'social'. The Washington University Law Review is one of the honest, posing the question, "What should be redistributed?"

The National Association of Social Workers proudly says: "Peace is not possible where there are gross inequalities of money and power, whether between workers and managers, nations and nations or men and women." I would say peace between them and sovereign individuals is not possible when they must use the force of their political power to 'distribute' money and power.

"Let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why?"  Walter Williams 

Amen. Just tell me how much of what I have is yours to 'distribute', for the purpose of your 'justice'--a justice which is unnatural by the laws of nature which oblige everyone who consults reason to the proposition that no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty, property, or health. (See John Locke)

A 'socially just' website, Buzzle.com, clearly states that "In a socially just society, there is equal distribution of wealth and property." By whom, and through the use of what force of power, is this to be achieved; and who gave the right to those who will effect the distribution?

The progressive position does not believe in individual sovereignty (IS). IS is not a road to total anarchy; the progressives don't like anarchy either because it leaves them with no power at all. But IS is Locke's idea of the individual being the source from which all governmental power is derived. I as an individual do not have the power to tax my neighbor for the 'general welfare' of paving the street so that we don't all get stuck in the mud. But government must have the power of building infrastructure.

When in a complete state of nature, I have the right to seek retribution upon anyone who does harm to my life, liberty, property (which metaphysically only is also my family members) or my health. But individuals are often cruel, literally taking an eye for an eye when that is not the right solution. Governments are formed to deal with this also.

Governments are not formed to take part of my wages or part of my home, as was demonstrated in Soviet Russia and depicted in the movie 'Dr. Zhivago'. That solution to homelessness is the logical extreme of progressive socialism--but so is the health care act. That is what Americans said about it when they rejected it in its first form--Hillary care. The dialectics of President Obama's speech patterns and the use of taqiyya to get what he wants led us to where we now stand, in all roads political and economic.

'Justice' cannot be separated by economics, because the distribution of economic elements from one individual or class to another class (never to another individual) is totally foreign to a Constitution that was written to protect the smallest minority, the individual.

See my local newspaper opinion on this subject.

© Curtis Edward Clark 2012

Arab Revolutions and Popular Sovereignty

     As for the point of calling the government the "popular sovereign", Locke is relevant in today's world of Arabic/Islamic revolutions. It is unlikely that in today's world any nation, let alone an Islamic nation, is capable of going the distance as America's Founders did, by making the sovereign the individual.

     Jefferson and the other founders conceived that if the people (individuals taken as a single body politic) had the right to turn over to the government some of their rights, then the individuals were the actual sovereigns, because they cannot turn over what they do not already have. In other words, you can't give away what you don't have.

     "Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..." http://www.friesian.com/ellis.htm

     This was carried through to the 20th century by Ayn Rand, who used many of the same phrases as the Founders:
"Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members."
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/indivi…

     However, this kind of thinking was rejected in the 12th century by the Muslims when they rejected the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) who fled to Spain to save his own life. Ibn Rusd didn't advocate individual sovereignty--it would take Americans to do that, by adapting to what Locke taught them. Locke learned from Aquinas who learned from Ibn Rushd and worked from many of the man's translations of Aristotle.

     And so, in today's world it probably isn't possible to see another America rise from the ashes of any nation whether Western, Eastern, or Middle Eastern because the idea of individual sovereignty cannot return in the U.S. until the States take back their 10th Amendment rights, after which the people can then take back their 9th Amendment rights (notwithstanding the recent controversy that the 9th is also tied directly to States' rights).

     Locke referred to "popular sovereignty". Thus, Madison wrote that "Individual rights and governmental powers were understood to be reciprocal—two sides of the same coin. As Madison wrote in a letter to Washington: 'If a line can be drawn between the powers granted and the rights retained, it would seem to be the same thing, whether the latter be secured[] by declaring that they shall not be abridged, or that the former
shall not be extended.'” http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/se… page 14

     It seems however that they have been abridged, and that "the former" has been extended. Locke's "popular sovereignty" may be composed in any way the individuals of the nation wish to compose it. Turkey has had "popular sovereignty" since the Second world war and Iraq is now trying to follow in Turkey's tracks, both nations operating in the manner of the Arabs, not the way of Europeans; and of the Islamic nations now undergoing revolutions and convulsions, some may turn to Arab popular sovereignty.

     It is unlikely, however, that any of them will turn to natural rights as fully as America did. They don't understand natural rights because that is what Ibn Rushd would have led to--an Islamic Locke (or Hobbes or Rousseau). Muhammad and Allah cannot allow western individualism which "regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life."

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011

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A Brief, Brief Exam of the Modern Counter-Enlightenment

    Someone recently asked if we have passed through the postmodern era into a new period of cultural and social history.

    No.

    "Marxism and postmodernism: people often seem to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical..."[1] They are neither. It was the 'modernists' who led us from Lockean/Jeffersonian individualism into the 'Beat Generation' of artists who came, post-WWII, from the indoctrination of the socialist elements of the unionist movements of their parents' and grandparents' generation.

    The tenets of the movement, its belief in progress, freedom, and equality, had been sustained from the outset by artists and intellectuals, and embraced by those who reaped the material benefits it brought.[2]

   Those were the individualists like Alexis de Tocqueville, whose historic first-hand description of Americans showed us to believe that "all values are human-centered, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on privacy, and on mutual respect. Negatively, it embraces opposition to authority and to all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state."[3] And so it included writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Washington Irving.

    But envy of men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, A. A. Talmadge, and others led to a form of anti-industrialism where the forerunner of today's lobbyists were the so-called competitors of those men. 

    "Intense lobbying began between 1869 and 1877, during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. The most influential lobbies wanted railroad subsidies and a tariff on wool. At the same time in the Reconstruction South, lobbying was a high intensity activity near the state legislatures, especially regarding railroad subsidies. The term itself came from Britain to describe approaches made to Members of Parliament in the lobbies of the House of Commons..."[4]

    Lobbying as it was practiced then does not 'embrace opposition to authority', it used authority; nor did it despise 'all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state'. It wanted the intervention of the State, because then the lobbyists gained power over those who could manage quite nicely without any government assistance.

    In other cases it was quite the opposite: those who could do quite nicely without government interference or 'assistance', were forced to pay-off men in high places who could create interference with tariffs and subsidies to their competitors who were seen as being unable to 'compete' without running interference on their behalf.

    'Modernists' were therefore anti-industrialist anti-individualists. The violence of the unionist movement is rampant with people more interested in wresting power from the industries, than with the plight of the poor working class who needed someone to speak for them, to help them raise their wages and gain benefits. "The Russian Revolution had seemed at the time, and for a long time after, to be the answer to the progressive modernist's dream."[2]

  We are--and have been since the age of Rousseau and Kant--in the age of the counter-Enlightenment. To think of 'modernism' or 'post-modernism' while stuck in one era (in which we are going backward toward Plato's Cave) is ridiculous. Until we overthrow the counter-Enlightenment that spawned Napoleon and Trotsky, Eugene V. Debs, the Industrial Workers of the World,  and "the anti-modern, ideological religious right"[5]--until we do this and get back to thinking in terms of negative rights rather than positive rights, (not to be confused with 'negative liberty' and 'positive liberty') will we actually be in the 'modern era'. Only then, someday far in the future, can we ever look to a 'post-modern' era---and I hope it's rational.

[1] New Left Review
[2] Modernism and Politics
[3] Britannica Precise Encyclopedia
[4] Lobbying in the United States: History
[5] American conservatism as Counter Enlightenment

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011

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The Ninth Amendment, Liberals, and Conservatives

     On March 11, I wrote, "if the Ninth Amendment is nothing but an inkblot to the Tea Party, the party will only mire itself deeper into the meaningless conversation about which of the lesser-of-two-evils of progressive argument to accept when those arguments are presented to them."
     Robert Bork is the apparent creator of that "inkblot" reference, but Tibor Machan* also said conservatives hate the Ninth Amendment, because, "actually, people have innumerable rights, and to list them all is impossible."
     That is where liberals have things in perspective, comparatively, so far as personal rights are concerned; it is why they support gay marriages and gay adoptions, personal drug use, abortion, and other things that conservatives despise and try to eliminate through legislation. But liberals deny such freedom when it comes to "windfall" profits or oil leases or the right to use incandescent light bulbs.
     Perhaps Bork meant "inkblot" in the sense that the Ninth Amendment has rarely been utilized in the courts to set precedents; it has actually been almost forgotten, to the delight of the Right.
     "The Ninth Amendment," wrote Daniel Farber, "is key to understanding how the Founding Fathers [ ] did not believe that they were creating these liberties in the Bill of Rights. Instead, they were merely acknowledging some of the rights that no government could properly deny."
     In the 1972 case of Baker v. Nelson, two gay students who wanted to get married cited the Ninth's protection of their right to marry as "unenumerated right to privacy". In the famous abortion case of Roe v. Wade, Chief Justice Harry Blackmun, rejected the lower court's Ninth Amendment justification, saying instead the right to privacy existed whether it came from the Ninth or the Fourteenth. Justice William O. Douglas Douglas "in his concurring opinion in the companion case Doe v. Bolton, stated more emphatically that, 'The Ninth Amendment obviously does not create federally enforceable rights.'"
    OMG! Of course it creates nothing--except the mandatory defense of it where necessary by the Courts, and the lack of offending legislation by any law-making body in the United States. There are very few other cases regarding the Ninth, but they do exist here and there.
    If anything, the Ninth Amendment is the most important one regarding personal rights, taking precedence over the First regarding free speech, peaceable assembly, and the right to practice one's religion; the Second which provides us with our means of self-protection. These rights, and others, could have been considered under the Ninth Amendment if the First and Second (and others) had not been created, though the specifics of the others may not have withstood some arguments had they not been written.
     But the fact is, all the arguments made by conservatives against personal liberties, arguments that fly in the face of the Ninth, are based on fallacious arguments, such as that marriage has always been for the lawful protection of children; the National Organization for Marriage calls it "fundamentally redefin[ing] what marriage is."
     What is marriage if not "the legal union of two people"? Who says it must be one male and one female, except God and his spokespeople? Citizen Link uses good statistics to show kids in married families, especially those with both biological parents, are better off growing up and do better as adults; but that doesn't say all of them are better off, nor that no children raised by gay or lesbian parents are not as well off. (I'll cite my own two sons as prime examples--they are now in their mid thirties; one is married with children, and one was in the military.)
     Instead, Link says, "If we are to concern ourselves with the welfare of children, we have to be concerned with the health of marriage in our culture."
Why should marriage be limited to one man and one woman?
     Why do people who deny the Ninth Amendment in today's liberal world think marriage should be between only heterosexuals? "First and foremost," says MInTheGap, "the reason that marriage has been, by definition, and institution between a man and a woman has roots in what the Creator of the World has proclaimed—way back in the book of Genesis."
     That reason, while it may be dogmatically religious, is also the reason it abuses the First Amendment prohibition against laws "respecting an establishment of religion."
     The Ninth is a protection of almost every action that is physically non-aggressive toward or against another person, which is the idea "that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions." [John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government, §6]"
     And that is all that the Ninth Amendment states; and it should read more like this:

"Whosoever shall act in accordance with the principle that no one may initiate aggression against another, shall not be found guilty of illegal acts."

 *1 2 3 4


© Curtis Edward Clark 2011
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Obama Economics is Artificially Hobbesian

     We are not flawed by nature, as Hobbes believed; yet we are not the way nature intended, either. 'Natural law', on which even the UN Charter is partly based, doesn't allow for such things as jihad, no matter what Hobbes may have thought about man being in a constant state of war.  
     It was Locke whose ideas were on the money, and from which were derived the Bill of Rights, in which the Ninth Amendment states that we still retain those natural rights which are not enumerated in the other Amendments. http://teapartyoriginalism.blogspot.com/…
     If you believe in Hobbes, you can accept the idea, if not the form, of jihad. If you believe in Jefferson's version of natural law, jihad is an abomination. When we literally had our gun sights on Osama bin Laden and our men were told to stand down and not take him out, that was an abomination; by the same logic that was used, we would not have killed Hitler in 1939, when he invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland.
     The 'command economics' of the Obama Administration and some similar actions in previous administrations are an abomination against the Ninth Amendment. They put Americans in a state of war against other Americans--as all command economics have done. The most famous of them, of course, are Social Security and Medicare; but the Tea Party, nor other conservatives, are calling for their abolition. They merely want to make them smaller, or in the case of S.S., to privatize it. That doesn't remove it from the field of command economics.
     No, we are are not acting in the way nature intended, so we are not the way nature intended us to be. We are fulfilling in many ways the wrongful description of being a species always at war with itself, because we are not listening to John Locke who told us "...that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions."
     "...command economies are unable to efficiently allocate goods because of the knowledge problem - the central planner's inability to discern how much of a good should be produced. Shortages and surpluses are a common consequence of command economies." Investopedia
     Yet, our government under President Obama is now telling us how much coal, versus how much oil, versus how much nuclear, versus how much "green" electricity we are to produce. It has (as of this writing) approved only one permit for oil drilling in the Gulf since the BP spill. Obama hates coal and says there is no such thing as 'clean' burning of it; nuclear reactors are off the table; and yet this Administration has given hundreds of millions to certain cities to build "recharching" stations for the coming of the electric car--which the government is "commanding" be built.
   This administration is even mandating the demise of the incandescent light bulb so that America doesn't have to produce any new electricity--even when  they are pebble bed modular reactors, very safe and extremely cheap.
     The idea is to maintain the current levels of electric usage, even while consumers know of much less expensive ways to run an economy:
1>produce more electricity, thereby putting more people to work and lowering the cost of power;
2>quit telling us how to use our capital, which only creates an artificial but untrue proof of Hobbe's war among men.   Or perhaps it isn't true that men such as Obama, Harding, FDR, and Hillary Clinton (Clinton-care) are not true Hobbesians. Maybe they think Hobbes was correct and simply "work" his system as if no systems with built-in justice existed:
     "Locke's state of nature, however, does contain right and wrong, and so natural rights. Thus, 'to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among men.'". Joseph J. Ellis
     Governments ought not be 'secured' in order to institute intellectual and economic wars among men, but to prevent them with open markets of ideas and goods. If we continue on the Obama Road to ruin, our great-grandchildren will be burning candles and wondering why the word "I" has been banned.

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011
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Individual Sovereignty and Ayn Rand

America's Founding Fathers challenged the institution of the state as the ruler of the individual. Man’s right to exist for his own sake, wrote philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand, was their guiding principle, and they were "determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man’s proper existence, by the 'unaided' power of their intellect."

Those Founders, she wrote, knew man as "an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life." From the Lockean concept of "popular sovereignty," differing from both Hobbes and Rousseau, where he laid the premise that the legis­lature was only empowered to legislate for the general welfare, the Founders discovered a political axiom.


Whether Locke meant to imply that sovereign power was only in the legislature or in the people, Jefferson and others concluded it was in the individual, the only political entity capable of thought, and the one ultimately responsible for his own welfare, and each must be the one in whom the primary authority rests. Without his consent, there can be no legislative body.


Black's Law Dictionary says sovereignty is "The state of condition of being free from dependence, subjection, or control." But under the U.S. Constitution, the people create a deliberate dependence on their governments to protect the rights they also claim to be able to recover when and if they should so decided to change their form of government. This implies directly that they freely submit some of their sovereignty to their government. That which is freely submitted is the power Locke called "popular sovereignty".

References from the Ayn Rand Lexicon:

1. For the New Intellectual
2. The Virtue of Selfishness 

Black's Law Dictionary; Fourth Edition

© 2010 FAMN LLC (MI)

What is "Individual Sovereignty"?

A couple of times I have been verbally assaulted in emails by people who claimed that only nations had "sovereignty". Apparently they have never heard of "popular sovereignty", a concept dating back to the middle of the 17th century, formulated as part of social contracts. "Popular" sovereignty is no more of a nation than "individual" sovereignty is.

John Locke, as Hobbes before him, claimed that social contracts were unbreakable. He stipulated however that if the legislatures did not work for the good of the citizens, they could replace the legislature.

"Popular sovereignty," therefore, becomes "the notion that no law or rule is legitimate unless it rests directly or indirectly on the consent of the individuals concerned."
http://www.basiclaw.net/Principles/Popular%20sovereignty.htm

Thomas Jefferson and others wondered how individuals could consent to give to a social contract powers they themselves did not have to begin with. We cannot give bread to a food bank if we don't have bread; how can we give consent to others to make rules for us if we don't have the original power to make rules for ourselves? They therefore concluded that individuals did, indeed, have such natural rights that only individual sovereignty could morally defend.

""Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Monroe, 1791

But, "Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..." Joseph J. Ellis

"And thus, [ascertained to him by natural and eternal equity,] every man is sole lord and arbiter of his own private actions and property--a character of which no man living can divest him but by usurpation, or his own consent. -John Trenchard, January 20,1721 The Freeman 

"The relationships between federalist political structure and the sovereignty of the individual must be carefully examined..." James M. Buchanan

In contrast to the Articles of Confederation, in which the sovereignty of the States, not all of which followed the rule of "natural rights", formed the United States, it was the sovereign people who created the United States under the Constitution. And the people were sovereign in their individual, not collective, capacities. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments saw to that.

"Legislation for communities, as contradistinguished from individuals," Hamilton wrote with Madison in Federalist No. 20, "is subversive of the order and ends of civil polity."

It even comes to us from the Czeck Republic's first President, Václav Havel: ""The sovereignty of the community, the region, the nation, the state--any higher sovereignty, in fact--makes sense only if it is derived from the one genuine sovereignty, that is, from human sovereignty, which finds its political expression in civic sovereignty." Cato Journal

Elizabeth Price Foley, wrote that the U.S. was created on two “foundational principles”, limited government and individual sovereignty.

No individual can willingly give to the "common sovereignty" what he himself does not already possess. This brings many questions to mind concerning taxation, the use of military and police force, etc. But those belong in another debate, and they can be rectified where they are wrong, to respect common or popular sovereignty, and often individual sovereignty.

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