So I was watching "The Colbert Report" last night - good stuff, by the way, and he was interviewing ABC's John Stossel, apparently somewhat of a Libertarian. They were discussing the FAA, and Colbert, in his smarmier-than-Bill-O'Reilly-but-a-lot-funnier way said (paraphrasing here) "There shouldn't be anyone telling me I can't fly my plane at 30,000 feet just because you're flying yours at 30,000 feet on the same vector. You know what will keep us from crashing? The invisible hand of the free market."
Market forces may be powerful and all, but they can't stop two planes from running into each other. The only thing that can do that is someone keeping track of each flight, everywhere in the country, and making sure that there aren't two planes scheduled to be in the same place at the same time.
Oh, and I hope that anyone who doesn't realize that by agreeing to live in a large and diverse society, you have to give up some amount of freedom just to keep the peace, wakes up a little. One can still be a strong advocate for freedom and understand that it's not a protected right to get on an airplane at O'Hare without walking through a metal detector. You don't have to get on that plane - it's a choice you're making.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
of you have sat, and perhaps thought, with us!
10 comments:
Act like you have a thought, R.
Never has a comment been deleted here for "disagreeing." Never has, never will.
Our Supreme Court passed down Dred Scott and ruled that it was alright to lock up Japanese in WWII. If your point is that not everything they've done was either good or helpful or even constitutional, I get it. I wasn't making a legal argument here, but a practical one.
Am I missing something here? Who is "R" ????
A guy who showed up in the last day or two in the comments here and has been involved in some feisty conversations. Some of his comments were deleted by mgt. See the key thread here.
I get it. I wasn't making a legal argument here, but a practical one.
Here's another practical argument: people who make calls to, or take calls from, known terrorists are a notch more into "implied consent" than people whose long distance calls are confined to Aunt Millie in Boca Raton.
Yes. And there is a legal, well-established procedure by which those calls can be monitored and still have the monitoring watched over by the judicial branch. There was not a single thing stopping Bush from using the FISA law, or, if that wasn't enough, going to Congress to change the law. The executive branch does not have unlimited power, wartime or not.
There was not a single thing stopping Bush from using the FISA law
True enough.
But you don't get points for being right; you get points for being pertinent.
There is also a long-established legal principle carved into [or out of, depending on how you may view such things] the Constitution by the Courts called "executive privilege". It's just as tawdry a trick, in my personal opinion, as "implied consent" is. But my opinion aside, it is what it is, and it's hypocritical to be against one but not the other, or in favor of one but not the other.
I don't like what went on any better than anyone here likely does, http://dblyelloline.blogspot.com/2005/12/american-sausage.html but I'm not about to say that one is more acceptible than the other. Civil rights are eroding all around us and have been for, roughly, 217 years.
Historically speaking, it's not the civil rights incursion done during/for wartime that are the problem; they come back. Historically, it's the ones taken away in peacetime, for "the benefit of everyone", that stay gone.
It's for everyone's benefit to rationalize 4th amendment violating searches at airports; on the roadways; at courthouse doors.
It's for everyone's benefit to track-n-trace people who buy decongestants.
Goodbye rights...
What are these points you speak of?
If you're not going to acknowledge the difference between things that affect the safety of others (like being searched at an airport) and things that affect the annoyance of others (like saying politically unpopular things), this discussion isn't going anywhere.
That's pretty similar to the response I've got for you, actually:
If you can't acknowledge the similarity between the government's authority to regulate X and their authority to regulate Y, there can't be a discussion.
It's real simple: the government has the authority to regulate. This isn't really debatable.
You are quibbling because you don't like certain forms that this regulation has taken.
Fine. Granted. But then you're making a specious argument that the regulation is itself "wrong" or "immoral" or some such. If it's wrong to regulate the actions of citizens, then it's wrong to regulate the actions of its citizens.
Doesn't matter if the actions can harm or otherwise.
A consistent argument is not a bad thing to have... really...
No, I'm arguing that the law says that some things can't be regulated, while other things can.
Post a Comment