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Sunday, March 30, 2014 - 3:43pmSanction this postReply
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Didn't we have something close to purchased citizenship in the 17th and 18th century?  Only property owners were considered to have a "stake," so only they were allowed to vote. 



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Sunday, March 30, 2014 - 4:12pmSanction this postReply
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Most self-identified "conservatives" want some kind of a return to the original Constitution. That means no income tax, and usually no direct election of senators. Whether it includes voting rights for adults under 21, women, and former slaves (or even legal slavery) is not clear.

You smear constitutional conservatives as wanting to take away women's rights to vote, and as seeking a return to slavery. What a viscious start to what might have been an interesting article. I don't know of a single instance of a conservatives advocating those positions.  Did you just make them up in your mind, or do they come from some neurotic, far-left, snarky blogger living in his parent's basement?

 

What constitutional conservatives want is a return to constitutionality - that is, to the practice of strictly limiting the powers of the government to what is in the constitution.  This means amending the constitution where it increases liberty or its protection. I would assume that the majority of Objectivists, and as best as I know, Ayn Rand, were in favor of constitutionality.

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The broad course of history suggests that no restoration ever brings back the past.

Strawman argument. It isn't the past that those who want a constitutionally limited government are seeking... it's constitutionality as opposed to a government limited only by what a politician of the moment desires - or what a majority of voters might want.

 

True principles are timeless. If they were good in the past but have been lost, who wouldn't want them to be reinstituted?  Wasn't Aristotle's logic brought back from the past by Thomas Acquinas?

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Why is citizenship different from any other service or commodity?

Because it is a bad idea to put government restrictions or subsidies up for sale.

 

Citizenship and the vote are intended to be the source of representative government where one person has one vote, and not about who purchases a vote.  It is a primary expression of the idea that individuals are soveriegn.  Because equality under the law begins with one person, one vote.  Because we don't think of bribery as a good way to pay politicians, we shouldn't use purchased votes to elect them.  If we are opposed to the idea of stuffing the ballot box as cheating the "one person, one vote" rule, then shouldn't we also object to "many dollars, many votes"?

 

Just curious, do you think it would be okay for corporations to funnel money to large numbers of individuals to buy "citizenship shares" as long as those "citizens" would vote to give those corporations subsidies?  Wouldn't that just create massive crony capitalism (which of course isn't capitalism at all).  I think that this scheme would just accelerate the drive towards democracy without constitutional protection of individual rights.  It would accelerate the drive towards larger government.



Post 2

Sunday, March 30, 2014 - 5:27pmSanction this postReply
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Wow...not one of your better ideas MEM.



Post 3

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 - 3:02amSanction this postReply
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Yes, voting has always involved "buying in" one way or another. In Athens, you had to be a natural citizen - naturalization was rare. Rome extended citizenship as it expanded along Italy and then across the Mediterranean. In the late Republic and Empire, many Greek cities did not pay taxes as such. Later, to fund the Empire with new taxes, new citizenship was extended to more cities.  Citizenship did not bring voting rights, but it brought the right to trial and ultimately (in theory) the right to appeal to the emperor himself - it is famously known that the Christian apostle Saul called ("Paul") was a Roman citizen because his home city, Tarshish, paid taxes. As America was being formed, the old medieval standards still applied: you had to own land, and pay some amount of tax on it. Merchants often lacked franchise as they rented their homes in the city. They also owned free and clear very little of the property that passed through their warehouses.

 

Joint stock companies were a new invention, but rested on older forms.  Clearly, partners shared in the profits in proportion to their investment in the enterprise. So, too, with joint stock companies, then, did each share come with one vote.   It is the capitalist way.  

 

In a world where Objectivism is accepted broadly - not necessarily consistently - the way that religion is accepted today, we might have a more capitalist constitution.  Note the lowercase "c."  A constitution is just the political organization, the business rules of the government.  It is famous that England (then Great Britain and the UK) has a constitution, only that unlike the American one, theirs is not written down in a single document.  Today, most of the 180 nations and their very many autonomous regions, "states", departments, prefectures, etc., all have constitutions. Mere "constitutional_ism" is no guarantee of individual rights by an objective standard.

 

We have an autobiography here of a USSR KGB general who narrowly escaped execution during a modern change of power - Andropov after Brezhnev, perhaps.  He and his wife were both KGB generals. He thought that she was a medical doctor.  Turns out she was a lawyer.  When the Moscow city police came to arrest him, she showed her credentials, inspected their warrants, found the papers lacking, and sent them away.  Why did the KGB even need lawyers, except that the USSR was a constitutional republic where constitutional-ism was important?  How could a lawyer stop the police in the USSR if the USSR was a ruthless, capricious dictatorship?  Of course, such niceties may only have been for VIPs - or maybe not.  We know that society from a great distance of time and space and culture.  The point is that mere constitutional-ism does little for capitalism.  

 

England was a great (nearly) capitalist nation without a written constitution. But they had an implicit acceptance of the very same principles underlying the document of the United States.  In fact, one the elements of the British constitution is their Bill of Rights 1689, which is (not surprisingly) very similar to our own Ten Amendments.  Those were the very rights that the founders of our republic wanted.  Had the king and parliament recognized them explicitly and applied them across the British Empire, history might have played out differently...  An imperial parliament at center with regional parliaments in India, New England, the Caribbean, etc....  

 

Be that as it may or may not have been, the success of our civilization grew from an implicit acceptance of the Enlightenment, the scientific method, individual rights, and free enterprise.  What would an explicit acceptance look like?

 

The Atlas Society is currently complaining about "the fourth branch of government" i.e., the unelected bureaucracy.  But how are they different from any management of any corporation?  The shareholders do not elect the managers. They elect a board of trustees or governors.  Those people hire a CEO and maybe another or two C-level officers.  At the local level of government, many cities have council-manager arrangements.  

 

Given all of that, it just seems interesting, and perhaps profitable to consider the value in granting more votes to those who own more shares.  Right now, Treasury Bills are denominated at $1000 each.  It seems like a nice round number.

 

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 4/01, 3:16am)



Post 4

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 - 4:17amSanction this postReply
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And along comes George Soros...



Post 5

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 - 10:21amSanction this postReply
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A constitution is just the political organization, the business rules of the government.

Our constitution is the explicit description of how the government is structured and what it is allowed to do.  Our constitution is in effect an answer to three questions:

  1. What is the proper purpose of a government?  To protect individual rights.  
  2. What is the greatest threat to individual rights? Government.
  3. How do we structure government to limit that danger? (See the Constitution for the answer to that one.)

That means that constitutionality is keeping the government from exceeding the limits that are set by the constitution.

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Mere "constitutional_ism" is no guarantee of individual rights by an objective standard.

The proper purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.  For a government that protects rights, instead of violating them, here are some of the key functions that must be fulfilled:

  • the constitution must reflect those individual rights,
  • the constitution must be the fundamental law of the land, and
  • the government must adhere to the constitution.

Those are the proper focal points of constitutionalism - it is the mechanism for protecting against the violation of individual rights by the government by amending the constitution where needed to keep it inline with individual rights, and to keep government from operating outside of the constitution.

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There is a difference between being able to sell one's vote (a bad idea for reasons mentioned in my previous post to this thread), and selling one's citizenship. Citizenship would be selling one's membership in the jurisdiction in which individual rights are protected.  It would be opting out of protection of one's individual rights (to the degree they are represented by the law).  Citizenship is the link between the government's proper purpose and those individuals to whom the protection applies.  This whole business of selling citizenship smacks of being something of a floating abstraction - a cutsey idea in search of a reason for being (while ignoring the harm it would do).



Post 6

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 - 5:55pmSanction this postReply
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You always would be subject to the laws of the geographic monopoly on force where you live.  However, you could buy and sell voting rights (bonds; shares) anywhere in the world ... or off-world or on any world, such as Luna or Mars or O'Neill-3 ("Neo Atlantis")  

 

You might own voting rights on one polity but not in an inferior or superior polity.  You might own Cleveland Municipals and US Government Treasury Bonds but not any state bonds. So, you could vote in local or federal elections, but not for Ohio offices. While doing so, you might actually live on Macao. You would be subject to the laws of that island - and you might have no voting rights there. However, you could vote in Ohio, and sell your shares, i.e., your voting rights, for whatever the market would bring.  If Ohio engaged in some unpopular action such as the construction of a maglev train between Cleveland and Cincinnati, shares might fall in value... or alternately, if that seemed like a good idea to many people who expected it to prosper, then shares (voting rights in Ohio) might rise. You might live in Brazil and be subject to their laws; and you might not vote there, either; but if you owned shares in Cleveland, you could vote there.  

 

If Armstrong City, Luna, is in a kerfuffle with Wells Welles, Mars, shares (voting rights) might see tranch volitility with puts and calls stuck in a range.  Actual shooting wars might have gone out with mysticism in the mid-21st century, but other conflicts would still obtain - and the markets would respond.

 

My computer is about to die.  It is a Windows XP machine. Microsoft will not support it after April 8 and neither will my wife.  So, she tells me to get Linux or do something else.  Actually, I am writing this on my "other" computer, a Macintosh White Book.  So, I may keep with this, retire the old Dell and next month buy something else.  So, too, with citizenship in a truly capitalist society will you put your money where your loyalties live -- or maybe just where you expect to make a profit.

 

You could own shares (voting rights) in more than one place.  Physical reality limits you to actually living in one place at one time and therefore being subject to the laws of that geographic monopoly on force.  However, you could sell voting rights and citizenship in many polities.

 

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 4/01, 6:13pm)



Post 7

Tuesday, April 1, 2014 - 6:40pmSanction this postReply
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I can't help but note that not a single one of my arguments were answered.  Oh well.

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I also notice that this thread is about citizenship, but the only thing being bought and sold is voting.  What's with that?  Is voting all there is to citizenship?

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Let's see, imagine that a person with a secret deal with the Iranian goverment runs for some office, and surreptiously, proxies for the Iranian goverment buy up voting rights.  No problem with that?

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The entire concept of the vote is about exercising individual soveriegnty and self-government.  Why is this floating abstraction of selling voting rights, which is like a stolen concept in that it completely ignores the very purpose of the vote, seen to have any value?    Hey, according to Marottas theory maybe he thinks he owns shares of all public property such that they can be sold.  Can you see him sanctioning this, "Anyone want to buy these shares of the military and all of its real property?  You there in Iran, how much do you offer?"

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If you want people living elsewhere, maybe even in another country, to elect the politicians where you live, please raise your hands.



Post 8

Wednesday, April 2, 2014 - 5:59pmSanction this postReply
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This is about the future of capitalism. The here-and-now only offers examples of what could, should or might be.

 

For example, you might find several reasons to be a citizen of one place, but a resident of another.  For one thing, non-citizens usually do not get conscripted.  Switzerland is just one nice place to live that still has mandatory military service.  Israel is another, except, of course, that in Israel you might actually have to fight...  Depending on what and where - and realizing that all goverments are rapacious and will squeeze anyone for their last girsh, fals, or centavo - you might find that your preferred mode of income (software, automobile repair, cellphone provisioning...) is unregulated or otherwise ignored for non-citizens. If you have US Government Social Security payments coming, Costa Rica is one place where you might find it easy to live without becoming a citizen. Some "preppers" (preparing for the end of the world) have traditionally found Mexico tolerable. Mitt Romney was born there, after all.   So, someone might choose to live on Armstrong Dome, Luna, but maintain a Wells Welles, Martian citizenship.  And they could at some other time move to Vega or Venus and change their citizenship to the United States of America or the United Stations of the Asteroids.

 

Moreover, in a capitalist future, you might be able to buy and sell citizenship packages just as we now buy and sell Carnival Cruises.

 

From the beginning until recently, the USA was adamant about your giving up allegiance to other princes and potentates.  In post-modern times, however, the USA has become lenient about dual citizenships.  In a capitalist future, you might have any number of citizenships.  Just because one place accepts you does not mean that every other place must reject you.

 

We think nothing of someone working for one company and owning stock in another, even a direct competitor.  No objective reason exists not to treat nations and nationality the same way.



Post 9

Wednesday, April 2, 2014 - 9:29pmSanction this postReply
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I applied for citizenship in Mordor but was rejected.  I wasn't Orc enough!  

Hrrmph!!



Post 10

Thursday, April 3, 2014 - 7:12amSanction this postReply
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Jules, that's what ya get for being Horde.

Post 11

Thursday, April 3, 2014 - 5:08pmSanction this postReply
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I can't help it I like the way my Orc hunter laughed!(have not played in a while)



Post 12

Saturday, April 5, 2014 - 8:58amSanction this postReply
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Steve,

 

I believe that what Michael is driving at is that, in the strict historical sense, a return to constitutionalism would deny the vote to both women and those withoit property. Universal male, non slave sufferage was established in 1828. So aren't you being s bit selective in demanding 'constitutionalism' only for those ideas that you personally favor?

 

Michael: you assume that market value is some sort of default mode, and therefore societies must make a conscious decision to over-ride 'natural markets' with social control and institutions such as one-person one vote. Nothing coud be farther from the truth.  

 

Markets are not natural. Rather, they're means of circulating either surplus production or goods deemed fit to sell on market value (commodities). 

 

To this end, there's a huge confluence of opinion between both historians and athhropologists: all societies posess dual economies of goods and services that are transacted per need and custom, and those that are set to markets to find 'value' via supply/demand. 

 

So it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate why votes should be transacted on an open market. What, for example, would be the cost/benefit?

 

For one, the wealthy would have far more votes--a condition that would obviously lead to a type of serfdom for the less well-off. So if this is your intent, kindly state why you'd favor this state of affairs.

 

-H



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Saturday, April 5, 2014 - 11:37amSanction this postReply
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Will,

I believe that what Michael is driving at is that, in the strict historical sense, a return to constitutionalism would deny the vote to both women and those withoit property. Universal male, non slave sufferage was established in 1828. So aren't you being s bit selective in demanding 'constitutionalism' only for those ideas that you personally favor?

I'll assume you aren't misunderstanding me on purpose.  Constitutionality is the practice of adhereing to the constitution as the primary mechanism involved in being a nation of laws, and in protecting individuals from abusive government.  It is a process and to be practiced properly it requires that the constitution be written so as to express individual rights and be a strict limit on government structure and action.  The amendment process is in the constitution to enable us get rid of those government acts that violate individual rights - such as condoning slavery, such as not allowing women to vote, and to improve the constitution as a mechanism for limiting government abuse.

 

I assume you didn't realize how insulting it is to imply (by the way you worded your paragraph) that I favor ideas like women being denied the vote.



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Post 14

Saturday, April 5, 2014 - 1:12pmSanction this postReply
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Guess who's back.  Note the sophomoric name-dropping, the fake-casual prose style, the misspellings and the method of starting out good-willed and getting progressively nastier.  Deadest giveaway of all is the overuse of "rather".

 

(Edited by Peter Reidy on 4/05, 1:38pm)



Post 15

Saturday, April 5, 2014 - 3:02pmSanction this postReply
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Off with her head. Summarily.

 

Sam



Post 16

Saturday, April 5, 2014 - 6:30pmSanction this postReply
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Is there a way to enable IP address detection for new member enrollment to prevent troll resurrections?



Post 17

Saturday, April 5, 2014 - 9:14pmSanction this postReply
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Maybe swearing on her/his word of honor that she/he is not the same person that has posted as Eva Matthews would bring some resolution to this dilemma.

 

Sam



Post 18

Saturday, April 5, 2014 - 10:12pmSanction this postReply
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Steve,

 

No insult intended. You're saying that the fundamental principles of the constitution have been violated, and that you want to return to said principles. f\Fair enough.

 

The only problem is that while the framers of the constitution indeed talked of personal freedoms in a formal sense, content-wise they faild to deliver, at least by modern standards. In other words, most all of what we really have today in the way of personal freedoms were gained long after all of the FF's were passed away.

 

So it's not to say that you are for denying women the right to vote or slavery. Rather, as the original document left these two and many more issues (ie privacy) at the doorstep of the states, my concern is that originalism would give states the right to deny citizens basic these liberties.

 

Now I want to ask you a favor: Who, exactly are these 'three stooges' who have contributed absolutely nothing to this conversation, yet have suggested that I'm a former female poster?

 

Why is this permitted on this site? I joined because a friend informed me  that it centered on the works of Rand, whom I find interesting. personal flame-contests, no. These people should not be permitted to post personal garbage.

 

Merely out of curiosity, therefore, perhaps you might inform me as to who this female is?

 

Thx, WH



Post 19

Sunday, April 6, 2014 - 2:40amSanction this postReply
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Will,

The only problem is that while the framers of the constitution indeed talked of personal freedoms in a formal sense, content-wise they faild to deliver, at least by modern standards. In other words, most all of what we really have today in the way of personal freedoms were gained long after all of the FF's were passed away.

Newton indeed talked of physics principles in a formal sense, content-wise he failed to deliver, at least by modern standards. In other words, most of what we have today came after his death. Does it make any sense to throw out Newton's contributions because he didn't create a view of physics that matches what we have today?

 

The framers got the principles right, but were not able to apply them all the way in their context. But their constitution lived on after them, and spoke for them generations later, and their principles were implimented for blacks and women.  Lincoln gave Thomas Jefferson credit for getting the slaves freed when Jefferson chose to write in that revolutionary document, "all men are created equal."  That was the central theme Lincoln came back to time and again.

 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  With that sentence Jefferson put the moral principle for governments purpose in place for all time.  Damning the founding fathers for not magically changing the culture so as to totally impliment individual rights is a very peculiar kind of attack.  (very reminiscient of Eva Matthews and Marotta - just saying)

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...my concern is that originalism would give states the right to deny citizens basic these liberties.

I didn't use the word originalism - I used the word "constitutionalism" and I spoke of the amendment process and I mentioned individual rights. I can't believe that anyone today could seriously believe that states rights would be interpreted to provide legal cover for taking the vote away from women or to give states the right to engage in slavery. If that's what you're claiming then I can't take you seriously.

 

And what are you proposing as a mechanism that would be stronger than a constitution which can't be ignored or overturned and must be amended to effect changes as a means of implimenting individual rights? A government of elites? Anarchy?  Unfettered democracy?  You sound so much like Marotta on these arguments.
----------------

 

You asked who "suggested that [you're] a former female poster?"  You want to know who Eva Matthews is?  Really?

 

Here is a post, under your member name: http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Dissent/0273.shtml#12
But the funny thing is that it is signed "Eva."   Why were signing your post with her name?

 

And the post above it: http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Dissent/0273.shtml#11, was identical - word for word - and it was posted under the member name "Matthews" (Eva Matthews) and signed "Eva."  That's kind of weird isn't it?

 

And then there is this post from you on a thread you created:  http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Dissent/0274.shtml#0

An hour ago i recieved a post sent by eva matthews. I then began researching old posts to see what the problem was,whether it was legitimate dissent, abuse, or whatvever the case might be.
As a long-time admirer of Ayn Rand who can explain, for example, why she thinks kant is evil, my conclusion is that this whole thing is childishly rediculous. So do you want new members? If so, you need to be willing to accept different opinions.. otherwise, youre beginning to sound like a cult, and i'm just not interested in that.

Will

That was from January 20th, shortly after Eva was moderated.  Of course, for all I know, Marotta, who posted back on that thread at about that time, might have created both Eva and Will. I mean it's the Internet, who knows?  



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