- The "peculiar and invaluable form of government" (CHAPTER XXXII.) of which Rawle, LL.D., was fond has a few features that ought to be regarded as bugs, instead.For example, consider just one of the provisions of Section 8 of Artcle I. In mind I have the second clause, "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States". Of course, what Washington, et al., really meant is the power and privilege to borrow money on the credit of tools and of useful idiots, imbeciles, and morons who are forced to pay debts accumulated in their names by other people, namely, legislators, governors, bureaucrats, and so on.It should go without saying that there is a serious moral hazard established when A obtains a license to borrow on the credit of B, and, furthermore, to rely upon intimidation and violence to make B pay A's debts. In no other context would this be regarded as anything but perverse and evil. Yet when the term, "government", is invoked as an excuse, people become averse to thinking logically government borrowing. Perhaps also a little populistic claptrap such as "We the People" and is expedient for all the As to get the Bs to go along with the scam.This evil, government borrowing, must be stopped, and if circumstances make it impossible to abolish this evil without abolishing Publius' imperial government, then it is that government itself which must then be abolished. It so happens that there are other good reasons to oppose Publius' government. One clue that this is so can be found in Article VII, although I won't explain any further now what that clue is.Btw, we should thank Teddy Jack Eddy profusely for bringing Rawle's work to our attention and, furthermore, for highlighting the GOP's approval of it. It would be interestsing to find out what comments, if any, were made by Lysander Spooner, another lawyer, about Rawle's apologetics for "Constitution for the United States of America". Even if Spooner never so much as heard of Rawle, however, anyone familiar with Spooner's three essays titled, "No Treason", ought to be able to predict the tone and theme of what Spooner might have said or written in response to Rawle and his howlers, e.g. the misleading remark about "voluntary association" in the 2nd paragraph of "Introduction".See No Treason, No. 1, which is followed by No Treason, No. II and No Treason, No. VI . (There are no No. III, IV, or V.) Also, scanned copies of both the 1825 and 1829 editions of Rawle's book are available for free from Google Books.
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- I'll have to absorb your post a little before trying to add to it. I expect others here won't have to though...-------------All - (Lock especially seems to always contest me on these posts :~})I sometimes post my strong dislike of the effects of herding our populations to cities, urban mentality in general, especially the density (population and mental), and the intense progessive disease that resides in urban areas. And that we now have over 80% of our population living in urban areas- for the 1st time. There's a Jefferson quote that supports my opinion;When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
Thomas JeffersonWell, theres a news article today in support of my opinion I can't resist throwing into the mix as well. Here's an excerpt;This may come as no surprise to residents of New York City and other big urban centers: Living there can be bad for your mental health.Now researchers have found a possible reason why. Imaging scans show that in city dwellers or people who grew up in urban areas, certain areas of the brain react more vigorously to stress. That may help explain how city life can boost the risks of schizophrenia and other mentaldisorders, researchers said.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/06/23/big-city-got-down-stress-s...
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- Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?
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- Welcome and thank you for bring Spooner back into the world of discussion. He was a very interesting man and it is interesting to read his Bio with a eye toward how we now use the Federal Reserve System to issue currency through the banks. This is a version of his concept of the banks issuing currency backed by land values [full faith and credit of the US government]. He recognized the need for a method of exchange[commerce funding] that was not limited by the metal currencies as those were mostly centered in the large cities so the west was limited in it's ability to conduct commerce.He held a view of the natural rights of man to finance and form shops and farms so they could escape poverty. He used the law to force issues which is still the case but now we have a SCOTUS that usurps and permits governments to usurp the Constitution. I need to spend some more time with him as the man saw the future and looking back will help us understand why we are where we are today.
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- Well, one of the problems with Spooner's thought is that he harbored a few flawed ideas about economics, or, rather, catallactics, as Ludwig von Mises preferred to call the science of exchange. You mentioned money and banking. Spooner also succumbed to the labor theory of value, which has been totally discredited, as it deserved to be.Still, Spooner was quite good concerning voluntary association and so was radically antiamerican in the sense of opposing Publius' imperial government, the one set up by Washington, Hamilton, et al. during the years 1786-1789. So it should suprise no one that most Americans have never even heard of Spooner, much less been given while young a fair and thorough introduction to Spooner's antistatism. Most Americans are educated in governmental schools or in private schools which are sympathetic to or tolerant of statism. The governmental schools might become both radically unstable and poorly funded if Spooner's liberalism became popular among students, and the latter schools are unlikely, albeit mostly for ideological reasons, to give Spooner a fair reading. Some of the latter schools are Christian ones, esp. Catholic. If so, they are tolerant, to say the least, of statism. See Modern Catholic Dictionary, esp. for entries for liberalism, government, and service, for some clues about the magnitude of the bishops' tolerance for statism and a related concept, collectivism. Supposedly "the rights of society in civil law" are neglected by liberalism. But it's not at all clear how a set, which is what we mean when we say or write 'society', could have rights. In fact, a set isn't even a living being, so how could it have rights? (On the other hand, we could construe society as activity, at which point it would be silly on its face to claim that society has rights.)Another barrier to respect for Spooner is that he opposed Christianity per se and he had sharp words about the character of Jesus of Nazareth. So if most or all of one's relatives are Christians, as is true for me, there's not much room for sympathy to Spooner. If one is the son of a civil servant who is or was employed by the government of Detroit, then so much the worse. In fact, I never even heard of Spooner until I was 40.
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- Lock - i can usually follow your point, even when in disagreement. I guess this time calling Jefferson a progressive is clouding my thoughts. Please, say it ain't so and you're playing devil's advocate somehow. I just can't find a space for Jefferson in the room full of 'progressives' I've come to despise so much.(unless, of course, you're making the 5000 YEAR LEAP point - as being true progress and should own the word progressive)
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- Excerpts of Jefferson’s papers have been published before. Four collections were produced between 1829 and 1904, but all were highly selective in terms of what they included and were full of typographical errors and garbled transcriptions. “People picked and chose the letters they thought were interesting or that created for them the Jefferson they wanted,” Oberg explains. None of the earlier collections included Jefferson’s incoming correspondence.The shelves of the offices Oberg and her five collegues occupy in Firestone are lined with more than 70,000 photocopies of everything in existence that Thomas Jefferson wrote or received, sometimes in multiple version, and important letters and documents about him. Those documents are drawn from more than 900 repositories around the world, including the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the University of Virginia, which hold the largest collections of original Jefferson papers. Others, however, come from libraries as far away as Paris, London, and Moscow, and even at this late date calls come in from auction houses and autograph dealers when a previously unknown piece of Jeffersoniana surfaces. In terms of completeness, organization, and legibility, the photocopies in Firestone comprise the world’s largest collection of Jefferson’s papers.If John Adams was, in historian Joseph Ellis’s phrase, a “passionate sage,” the Jefferson that comes across in these papers is much more dispassionate. “His letters to his daughters make me very sad,” Oberg says. “He is very restrained, controlling.” A typical letter from Jefferson to his daughter Martha in early 1799 begins with some rather transparent nagging: “The object of this letter, my very dear Martha, is merely to inform you I am well, and to convey to you the expressions of my love. It will not be new to tell you that your letters do not come as often as I could wish.” Also amidst Jefferson’s correspondence in the 13 months covered by the current volume is a letter in which he thanks his son-in-law for disciplining slaves caught growing tobacco in their own small gardens. “I have ever found it necessary to confine them to such articles as are not raised for the farm,” he writes. “There is no other way of drawing a line between what is theirs and mine.”Although the volumes contain much material never before seen by scholars, they contain few of what the casual reader might call bombshells. Oberg says we are unlikely, for example, to find correspondence in subsequent volumes about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, simply because that was not the sort of thing likely to be addressed in a letter. Rather the revelations, particularly about the fine points of Jefferson’s political philosophy, come in the details, between the lines. By meticulously noting all of Jefferson’s revisions, one can gain insights into his thoughts as he composed his papers. We can watch him edit himself. By reading his incoming correspondence, scholars can better divine Jefferson’s motives for what he wrote, noting what he responded to or chose to ignore. Finally, by gathering the documents together, one can watch history unfold.As an example of this, Oberg cites the Kentucky Resolutions, which are contained in the current volume. Jefferson’s resolutions, which he wrote anonymously and which were adopted by the Kentucky General Assembly in November 1798, advanced the doctrine that states could nullify acts of Congress (in this case, the Alien and Sedition Acts) that they believed to be unconstitutional. That doctrine of nullification would be taken up again by Southern states as a defense against encroachments on slavery. Although it had been known that Jefferson wrote the resolutions, the details of his role in their creation are explained in a very detailed and informative annotation. And never before had Jefferson’s first draft, finished draft, and the completed resolutions, along with related correspondence, been collected together in one place, enabling a scholar to trace their development from Jefferson’s pen to the final document.In part because of Jefferson’s uneasy coexistence with slavery, revelations about the Hemings affair, and the celebration of his Federalist rival, John Adams, in recent popular biographies, Jefferson’s reputation has waned in recent years. He has been called duplicitous and inconsistent by scholars such as Adams biographer David McCullough.Still, as the Princeton papers show, the Jefferson who owned slaves also wrote ringing declarations of freedom. In a letter dated June 18, 1799, to William G. Munford, which will appear in the next volume, Jefferson discourses on the nature of knowledge. “What is once acquired of real knowledge can never be lost. To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for so long as we may think as we will, and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.” As Julian Boyd observed, “If all other writings of Jefferson were destroyed, the essential quality of the man would remain fully and brilliantly portrayed in this single document.”And so, according to Brown’s Gordon Wood, Jefferson remains today “a crucial figure – if not the crucial figure – in American history.” No one else articulates the vision of a democratic America in the same way, and if that vision fell short of reality, if it was sometimes clouded by inconsistency, it is a vision that compels us still. More than two centuries after he first took the oath of office, biographer Joyce Appleby says, Jefferson is still cited more frequently than any other president. “We can’t really do without Jefferson.”
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- The shelves of the offices Oberg and her five collegues occupy in Firestone are lined with more than 70,000 photocopies of everything in existence that Thomas Jefferson wrote or received,
I would dearly love to have access to that collection!
Lock,
Could Jefferson be equated with a modern progressive? Short answer, no. While some of his ideas could be placed into that category if taken in total they do not. A very complex man, to say the least and, if the measure of a wise man is based on his ability to modify his opinions based on experience and accumulated knowledge, a very wise one
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- Jefferson and Adams disagreed on many matters here is just a taste - if any desire there is more available. Adams hated slavery and Jefferson held slaves and much of the fight IMO started here.John Adams -All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. – Letter to Thomas Jefferson (23 August 1787)The new Government has my best Wishes and most fervent Prayers, for its Success and Prosperity: but whether I shall have any Thing more to do with it, besides praying for it, depends on the future suffrages of Freemen. - Letter to Thomas Jefferson (2 January 1789)There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution. - Letter to Jonathan Jackson (2 October 1789)The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to be careful to prevent their growth in our own. – First Address to Congress (23 November 1797)The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a Theatrical Show. Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that; i.e. all the Glory of it.I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization. – Letter to François Adriaan van der Kemp (16 February 1809)You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a Theatrical Show. Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that; i.e. all the Glory of it. - Letter to Benjamin Rush (21 June 1811)Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.We have now, it Seems a National Bible Society, to propagate King James’s Bible, through all Nations. Would it not be better to apply these pious Subscriptions, to purify Christendom from the Corruptions of Christianity; than to propagate those Corruptions in Europe Asia, Africa and America! … Conclude not from all this, that I have renounced the Christian religion, or that I agree with Dupuis in all his Sentiments. Far from it. I see in every Page, Something to recommend Christianity in its Purity and Something to discredit its Corruptions. … The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount contain my Religion. - Letter to Thomas Jefferson (4 November 1816)Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society. - Letter to J.H. Tiffany (31 March 1819)
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- He held the belief that progressive taxes were called for but so did Franklin. Many of the FF were progressive as they came from a Kingdom view point and had the knowledge that the nobles were charged with caring for the peasants. So, in today's terms they would still IMO be Progressives - not all Progressives are liberal.
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- Nathan here is the link and they give other links to the Jefferson papers.
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