Lincoln was a dictator? The camera is the new gun. We the people have to be vigilant about our loss of freedom.

The Barrister at Maggie's Farm posts this interview of Judge Andrew Napolitano that was conducted in 2010. Here are some portions of it that interested me. (Actually, I found every word of it to be interesting.)

Daily Bell: What is justice in your opinion – having sat on the bench?

Judge Napolitano: I don’t think I can answer that in a simple paragraph. But justice is the enforcement of the fair response to human behavior consistent with natural law and consistent with the rule of law. So that means that you have to accept that the Declaration of Independence is not just a Jeffersonian musing, but is fundamental to American values. Our rights come from our humanity, which is a gift from God; they don’t come from the government, so they can’t be taken away by the government. You have to accept the role of government as an arbiter with respect to the infringement of those rights whether by an executive or legislative branch, or whether by a private person. Really there is no formula other than recognizing natural rights, accepting the fundamental law of the land, being fair and being brutally honest and having no interest in the outcome.

Daily Bell: Does President Barack Obama understand the Constitution in your opinion?

Judge Napolitano: I don’t think so, unless the Barack Obama that we witness in the White House is putting on an act. I mean to him the Constitution is no impediment to the exercise of judicial power. I have to modify this by saying rarely have we had a President who understood the Constitution. Grover Cleveland understood the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson for the most part of it understood the Constitution; Andrew Jackson partially understood the Constitution but very few others have.

Daily Bell: You served as an adjunct professor of Constitutional law at Seton Hall Law School, where you provided instruction and jurisprudence. Is the law constitutional these days? What does that mean?

Judge Napolitano: Yes, I did that for 11 years. You mean are laws written to the Constitution? The answer is no. Most members of Congress couldn’t care less what the Constitution says. Even though they have taken an oath to uphold it, preserve it, protect it and defend it, which was the same oath I took when I became a judge. I was interviewing a Congressman from South Carolina, Jim Clyburn, who’s the number three ranking Democrat in the house, and I asked him quite simply and plainly where in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to manage health care? He told me, “Judge, most of what we do down here, (referring to Washington) is not authorized by the Constitution.” The torturing and twisting of the plain language of the Constitution in order to permit the expansion of the federal powers has resulted in the loss of liberty and freedom of choice.

Daily Bell: Tell us about your book, Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History.

Judge Napolitano: It is a rollicking tour from 1776 to 2008 about the classic lies the government has perpetrated on the people and the political, legal and moral effect of accepting those lies. I argue that the dirty, little secret of American history is that the Constitution is rarely enforced and the government gets away with its violation of the Constitution in the most explicit ways. It basically seeks to point out government’s myth-making when it comes to such constitutional points as, “all men are created equal,” or “Congress shall make no law abridging a freedom of speech,” or “all persons shall be secure in their property, houses, possessions.” I argue that FDR caused Pearl Harbor, that Lyndon Johnson created out of thin air the Gulf of Tonkin, that George Bush knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and was in fact authorizing his agents to torture people. I catalogue these and government lying about them in the book.

Daily Bell: What do you think of the Constitution and how it was written and the principles it espouses?

Judge Napolitano: When it was written it had some defects in it. It permitted slavery; it even permitted the slave trade. So one can love the restraint to impose on government, and one can love the bill of rights. One can appreciate the separation of powers within the federal government and the federal system as it relates to sovereign states that can act as a check to the federal government. But once we overcame things like discrimination based on race, and discrimination based on gender, it is a brilliant document that guarantees liberty and ensures the separation of power. Now unfortunately it has been harmed by at least two amendments that are unconstitutional. Now here is an interesting question: Can a part of the Constitution be unconstitutional? The answer is yes. The 16th amendment and the 17th amendment encapsulate the income tax and the changing of the manner in which the US Senate is elected. So the Constitution we have today is nowhere near the beautiful balanced instrument of limited government that the framers gave us. It’s barely a shadow of it’s original self.

Daily Bell: Some say the Constitution was a step backward from a less structured federation of states. Agree or disagree – and why?

Judge Napolitano: I agree. I do agree. I think that we would be far happier today under the Articles of Confederation than under the current Constitution, but we would also be happier today under the Constitution were it interpreted as it was intended to be. Unfortunately, almost from the beginning, and certainly with Chief Justice John Marshall, we bear witness to the march away from state sovereignty, the march away from individual liberty and the march toward federal dominance. This march has accelerated and decelerated at various times in our history. Usually at wartime it becomes more accelerated. But from the end of the Civil War and certainly from and after the FDR era, the march has consistently been away from state sovereignty away, from individual liberty and toward federal dominance.

Daily Bell: Did the Constitution lay the foundation for the War Between the States?

Judge Napolitano: I think War Between the States was fought over the issue of federal dominance. I think slavery was not the reason for the War Between the States. I think that Lincoln was a dictator who was terrified that by the loss of tariffs from southern ports – about 55 million dollars a year in 1860. it was a huge portion of the federal government’s income, which consisted at the time of tariffs, user fees and land sales. It was the loss of those ports that caused Lincoln to wage war against the states. I don’t think it was the Constitution that facilitated war. I think it was monster government that facilitated the War Between the States. I think slavery would have been eradicated on its own, much as it had been in Puerto Rico and Brazil and Portugal and Great Britain and even years earlier in western Europe.

Daily Bell: Would America have been better off without a Constitution?

Judge Napolitano: No, I don’t think so. America is better off with a Constitution if it meant what is said and interpreted as written. Because it does say, on its face, that there are certain guarantees. Regrettably, the government has rarely upheld those guarantees. The beauty of the Constitution was the idea of checks and balances. Men, as Madison said, “are not angels.” They will be drawn more toward power than toward liberty if there isn’t something to check the drive toward power.

Daily Bell: Why doesn’t current public law pay attention to economic laws – specifically the law of supply and demand and marginal utility?

Judge Napolitano: I wish I knew the answer to that. For some reasons, some of the fiercest defenders of civil liberties are also some of the fiercest adversaries to commercial liberties. I would argue that my fellow libertarians are the only people in the country who truly defend freedom because we defend civil liberties and commercial liberties. Even the flip side of this is deplorable. The Republicans, which from time to time have acted as if they defend commercial liberties, have assaulted civil liberties as well. We have migrated from a two-party system into a one-party system, the big-government party. There’s a democratic wing that likes taxes and wealth transfers and assaults on commercial liberties and there’s a republican wing that likes war and deficits and assaults uncivil liberties. Neither of them is interested in true freedom. The separation of civil liberties from commercial liberties is what has enabled this to happen.

Daily Bell: Do you have any final thoughts? Anything you want to say to readers that we didn’t ask about?

Judge Napolitano: I have enjoyed this interview. I hope the readers enjoy it as well. The people have to be vigilant about the loss of freedom. They have to press representatives in Congress to justify their behavior. And the camera is the new gun. Whenever you deal with the government, whether it’s a janitor or school teacher or a police office or a legislator, you want to film it because that will scare the daylights out of them. The government hates transparency and it hates fresh air and light and fresh air and light is a way to scare it back into its confines.

Read more here.

What citizens can do to resist the ruling class’s redefinitions of moral and cultural norms

Angelo M. Codevilla writes in National Review,

Peaceable behavior will not protect you from being hounded as a “hater.” A whiff of “offensive” attitudes is enough for the ruling class to make you as untouchable as the lepers of old. Nor is silence a refuge. Just as you must honor homosexuality, so you must affirm that certain Americans are “racists” addicted to “white privilege.” Do you demur? Then, Racist that you are, you must be shunned and should be fired. Do you support governmental efforts to reverse “anthropogenic global warming”? If you demur, you are a Denier who endangers our national security, and must be treated as a kook. Should you refuse to pledge your fealty to the proposition that life and the universe are the meaningless result of chance, you reveal yourself to be a Religious Zealot, an “American Taliban,” ineligible for public and private trust. Do you have reservations about the constitutionality or beneficence of administrative government? Then you are an Extremist, a proper target for Homeland Security, the IRS, the NSA, etc. Do you refuse to celebrate “terminating a pregnancy” as women’s fundamental right? Then you are a Warrior against Women, possibly a terrorist. Do you own guns? Ipso facto, you are a Violent Extremist.

The ruling class’s demands that we mold ourselves to its appetites, based on the pretense of its own superior status, amount to pulling rank. But, by forsaking reason, our rulers leave their premises naked to challenges through reason and cede authority to whoever is willing to deal in the coin of explanations. The ruling class shouts: “The debate is over!” “Shut the bigots up!” This may cow public opinion, but it destroys the capacity to lead it. In fact, public opinion can be led only by persuasion regarding true and false, better and worse. This is how free human beings deal with one another. No democratic case can be made for limiting substantive challenges to premises and pretensions. Lincoln, following John Quincy Adams, pointed again and again to the slaveholders’ efforts to silence debate about slavery’s moral and political effects as evidence of the slaveholders’ threat to the freedom of whites as well as of blacks. Like Adams, Lincoln pressed slavery’s hard, ugly realities upon audiences that preferred to evade them. As Lincoln brushed away the euphemisms and legal constructs in describing the slave trade’s merchandising of human beings, so should we not mince words regarding all that the ruling class demands that we honor.

...The demand that we call homosexual unions “gay marriage” forces us to honor something that is far from “gay” — i.e., lighthearted, joyful — but, in the case of male homosexuals, anal intercourse, which impairs the health of the persons involved and of society. Why honor it by calling it marriage? Perhaps because it is an instance of “love between consenting adults”? But what sort of society can be based on honoring all manner of sexual relations between any and all “consenting adults”? This logic applies with precisely the same force to polygamy, and to sexual relations between parents and adult children, or between brothers and sisters, as it does to sexual relations between two non-consanguineous homosexuals. But the assertion that mothers and fathers and children are interchangeable is a lie. The Supreme Court, in Reynolds v. U.S. (1878), judged that monogamous (they did not have to say “heterosexual”) marriage is the cornerstone of a free society. Why, precisely, should we reject that judgment as ignorant and mean-spirited? Before 1961, all 50 states criminalized anal intercourse, heterosexual as well as homosexual. Why, precisely, were they wrong in doing so? By what right does anyone place such questions “out of bounds”?

...The ruling class also refers to abortionists as providers of medical services for “reproductive rights,” and indicts as “extremists” those who illustrate what the abortionists do with photos of what surely look like children, with arms, legs, and heads chopped or burned. Yet each of these little ones’ DNA shows him or her to be a son or a daughter of a particular mother and father. Lincoln argued that no one has the right to exclude any other person from the human race. Why is it right so to dispose of millions of little sons and daughters? By what right does anyone dishonor as “extremists” those who show the victims for the human beings they are?

...In our time, if a candidate were to challenge his opponents to bare-knuckle, Lincoln–Douglas sessions, his example might lead fellow citizens to reject the combination of poisonous sloganeering and of dominance, submissiveness, and corruption that now passes for politics. Retaking control of our lives requires us to reason with one another and to decide for ourselves what is good and bad, better and worse, true and false. This is how it was when we were free.

Read more here.

"I," "Me," "My"

Terence P. Jeffrey notes that President Obama gave a speech in Chicago Tuesday explaining why he acted unilaterally on immigration. In the Chicago speech Obama

used the first person singular—including the pronouns “I” and “me” and the adjective “my”—91 times

President Abraham Lincoln gave speeches, too. Here is his second inaugural address, in which he used the first person singular once:

FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN:

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war-seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Read more here.
Thanks to Christopher Buckley

Some President's Day quotes

“You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence.” – Abraham Lincoln

“True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity, before it is entitled to the appellation.” – George Washington

“I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an “Honest Man”.” – George Washington

“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

“I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.” –President Calvin Coolidge

"You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred." Abraham Lincoln

"You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." Abraham Lincoln

Found here.