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.

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)

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).

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.

I applied for citizenship in Mordor but was rejected.  I wasn't Orc enough!  

Hrrmph!!

I can't help it I like the way my Orc hunter laughed!(have not played in a while)

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.

Off with her head. Summarily.

Sam

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

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.
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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?