Mark Levin slips up a bit with his inclusion of the slavery issue in his chapter “On Federalism.” Up until this chapter the reader of Liberty and Tyranny is to believe that the New Deal is when the Supreme Court went astray with their judicial activism, but Levin cites two heavy-handed Supreme Court decisions that [...]
Continue reading about Liberty and Tyranny – Contradictions on Federalism
The chapter “On Federalism” from Mark Levin’s book Liberty and Tyranny has a lot of good information in it. The focus of this deconstruction may be on misinformation, but to omit the context of the good information would be misinformation in itself.
Levin echoes the sentiments of James Madison that the Constitution was meant for a [...]
Continue reading about Liberty and Tyranny – Information on Federalism
Property is neither a natural right, as John Locke claimed, nor a fence to liberty, as claimed by James Madison. The natural right claim is easily dismissed. If you live in Connecticut you do not own property in California unless there is some type of government to back up your claim. “Squatter’s rights” or “use [...]
Continue reading about Liberty and Tyranny – Private Property
The political essays from Systems out of Balance go into great depth regarding the shared ingredients for wisdom and democracy. Both draw from diverse, independent and decentralized experiences. Both find a way to determine the norm from these experiences. Both serve the many, rather than the few.
We started out as a federated democracy, drawing from [...]
This is the third entry of a short series offering empirical criteria for judging Presidents, rather than cherry-picking data to reinforce an ideological bias. The first two entries focused mainly on economics, an area where I would not expect much difference between Presidential administrations. Since the seventies certain trends have occurred regardless of who was [...]
As an empiricist I am not likely to ever call myself a conservative or liberal, since that implies a fixed belief or dogma, and I consider my beliefs to be theories open to the testing of experiences. Yet I have another, almost opposite, frustration with political ideologies. As fixed as they may be at any [...]
Both conservatives and liberals have noble ideals. Yesterday’s entry covered the conservative ideal of responsibility; this entry will address the liberal ideal of compassion.
Liberals swim against the tide a bit more with their ideal. Few question the virtue of responsibility; we’ve got a whole misinformation network convincing us that we should be greedy instead of [...]
I will soon excerpt the final essay from Systems out of Balance on The Middle Class Forum. I write in the book that the middle class is both the victim and the villain for how misinformation has hurt us. I also claim that we now need to be the vanguard for restoring balance to our [...]
Systems out of Balance will be published sooner rather than later at this point, I’m projecting first week of March. As a prelude to that I will be excerpting in pieces the last essay from the book, “Restoring Balance.” As a prelude to that prelude I have a message for conservatives and liberals in preparation [...]
Many problems to our economic system will not be fixed unless we also fix problems with our political system. A common refrain you hear among special interest groups, particularly the ones who are opposed to whatever party controls Congress, is we must vote all the bums out. To an extent I agree with this sentiment, [...]
Continue reading about 2008 Issue #5 – Fixing our Political System
