ace off's List: CHOICE, BEHAVIOR, SOCIETY

• For example, if the spoken words accuse the claimant of committing a crime; of having a contagious disease; of being unfit for his or her office, business or profession
• Is to a person’s discredit.
• Tends to lower him or her in the estimation of others
• Causes him or her to be shunned or avoided.
• Causes him or her to be exposed to hatred, ridicule or contempt.
• must tend to lower the claimant in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally
• they are not defamatory unless they amount to a disparagement of the reputation in the eyes of right-thinking people generally.
• the jury’s role is twofold.
• what the words mean in their natural and ordinary sense.
• the jury must decide whether that meaning is defamatory
• The law of defamation recognises two types of meanings.
• he natural and ordinary meaning of the words
• the innuendo meaning:
• False Innuendo
• e Innuendo:
• rue innuendo arises when words that appear to be innocent to some people appear as defamatory to others because they possess special knowledge or extra information
• A claimant can ask that the court consider a statement’s false or true innuendo meaning.

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• 286 projects in fifty-seven countries that had been implemented by a wide range of government, nongovernment, and international organizations. Thi
• The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)3—a “comprehensive scientific assessment of the world agriculture to date”—was compiled with the input of hundreds of scientists.

• capitalist economies of the world are in deep trouble.
• Many countries embraced neoliberalism
• paying the piper for years of deregulation.
• the most efficient and straightforward way to proceed would be for the federal government to nationalize some large banks, wipe out their shareholders,
• auto industry must be both saved and transformed, lest millions more become unemployed
• national health care plan is mandatory, both to lower business costs and to keep workers healthy.
• Businesses find themselves inside a system based on vicious competition,
• lobbyists, and these people often write the legislation
• supposed to be in the public interest.
• No matter what the government initiative, self-interested parties try, and often succeed, in bending the legislation
• We can’t have a true national health care system because the insurance and drug companies, plus their allies in medicine, won’t stand for i
• and have the power to prevent it.
• Private housing interests stand ready to stop public housing.
• private interest will win out in the end.
• o matter the gravity of the problem,
• From society’s point of view,
• capitalism is an irrational system.
• The U.S. economy is in for a long period of anemic growth and high unemployment.
• “greening” of capitalism, spurred by large government spending
• the world could ecologically support billions of human beings consuming at a pace on par with middle-class U.S. households?
• we cannot be happy with the nature of the work most of us are compelled to do. Millions of us are unemployed, and this is a bad thing. But for those working, the stress is rising, as fewer people are being forced to do more work, and employment becomes more precarious. Employers use periods like this to discover ways to reduce the size of their workforces permanently
• The only thing worse than being employed is being unemployed”?
• Adequate food for everyone.
• Food production and distribution
• Decent housing. As we argued above, attractive and relatively inexpensive housing could be built by a public corporation, and workers could, at the same time, be trained to build and maintain houses.
• Existing buildings could be rehabilitated,
• Universal health care. T
• Full employment/good jobs
• Quality education for all.
• Adequate income in old age. Th
• ess reliance on regressive payroll taxes.
• We must stop thinking of our natural resources as private property, to be endlessly exploited and polluted, and begin thinking of them as the wealth of us all.
• Labor- and environment-friendly trade
• Ours could be an economy and society whose purpose is not private gain, but to serve the needs of the people—because it is truly of the people.
• People democratically deciding the direction and details of the economy—production, as well as consumption, with the purpose of meeting human needs.

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• saving the planet from the ecological destruction wrought by capitalist expansion.
• to accomplish this through the further expansion of capitalism itself, cleared of its excesses and excrescences. A
• “sustainable developers” argues that there is no contradiction between the unlimited accumulation of capital
• and the preservation of the earth.
• “sustainable capitalism,” bringing the efficiency of the market to bear on nature and its reproduction.
• Behind this tragedy-cum-farce is a distorted accounting deeply rooted in the workings of the system that sees wealth entirely in terms of value generated through exchange.
• In such a system, only commodities for sale on the market really count.
• U.S. climate economist William Nordhaus has, of the relatively unhindered growth of the economy a century or so from now, under conditions of business as usu
• Such widely disparate predictions from mainstream economists and natural scientists are due to the fact that, in the normal reckoning of the capitalist system, both nature’s contribution to wealth and the destruction of natural conditions are largely invisible.
• •  the distinction between wealth and value (use value and exchange value). With this was lost the possibility of a broader ecological and social conception of wealth. 
• the distinction between wealth and value (use value and exchange value)
• another critical perspective was abandoned
• With this was lost the possibility of a broader ecological and social conception of wealth.
• “Lauderdale Paradox.” James Maitland, the eighth Earl of Lauderdale (1759-1839), was the author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase (1804).
• inverse correlation between public wealth and private riches such that an increase in the latter often served to diminish the former.
• “Public wealth,” he wrote, “may be accurately defined, — to consist of all that man desires, as useful or delightful to him.”
• But private riches,
• consisting “of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.”
• Scarcity, in other words, is a necessary requirement for something to have value in exchange, and to augment private riches.
• not the case for public wealth,
• includes not only what is scarce but also what is abundant
• if exchange values were then attached
• nhance individual private riches
• but only at the expense of the common wealth.
• one could monopolize water that had previously been freely available
• “The common sense of mankind
• “would revolt” at any proposal to augment private riches “by creating a scarcity of any commodity generally useful and necessary to man.”
• “So truly is this principle understood by those whose interest leads them to take advantage of it,” Lauderdale wrote, “that nothing but the impossibility of general combination protects the public wealth against the rapacity of private avarice.”3
• From the beginning, wealth, as opposed to mere riche
• “intrinsic value,” and what later political economists were to call “use value
• Material use values had, of course, always existed, and were the basis of human existence.
• commodities produced for sale on the market under capitalism also embodied something else: exchange value (value).
• ommodity was thus viewed as having “a twofold aspect,” consisting of use value and exchange value.
• the contradiction between total public wealth (the sum of use values) and the aggregation of private riches (the sum of exchange values).
• (use value and exchange value) conceptually distinct.
• the importance of keeping wealth and value
• if water, or some other natural resource formerly freely available, acquired an exchange value due to the growth of absolute scarcity, there would be “an actual loss of wealth” reflecting the loss of natural use values — even with an increase of private riches.6 
• But political economy was to encompass in its concept of value — which was to displace altogether the concept of wealth — nothing but exchangeable valu
• Natural or public wealth, as opposed to value in exchange, was to be left out of account.7
• Things for which nothing could be obtained in exchange, however useful or necessary they may be, are not wealth
• n Political Economy.
• Herbert Spencer’s chapter in his Social Statics (1851), “The Right to the Use of the Earth.”
• “the great corporate body — society.”

• “co-heirs” to the earth.15

   
• nature’s right not to be reduced to a mere commodity. T
• “Land refers to all natural resources — all ‘free gifts of nature’ — which are useable in the production process
• “Land has no production cost; it is a ‘free and nonreproducible gift of nature.
• “natural capital comprises all [free] gifts of nature.”21
• In the capitalist logic, there was no question that nature was valueless (i.e., a free gift).
• how to jettison the concept of wealth, as distinct from value, from the core framework of economics, since it provided the basis of a critical

• “ecological” — outlook. 

   
• commodity fetishism of capitalist value analysis
• Nature is just as much the source of use values
• “Man and nature,”
• “labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.
• continue to cooperate.”
• Capitalism’s failure to incorporate nature into its value accounting, and its tendency to confuse value with wealth, were fundamental contradictions of the regime of capital itself.
• accumulation of value, even at the expense of real wealth
• capital had a vampire-like relation to nature — i.e., represented a kind of living death maintained by sucking the blood from the world
• bonds, mortgages, promissory notes, bank bills, or other stipulations for the transfer of wealth.
• whose value represents merely the power of one class to appropriate the earnings of another class
• obliterating the notion of use value and defining wealth entirely in terms of exchange value.
• capitalist economics under the regime of absentee ownership was the seizure of public wealth for private benefit
• “a settled practice of converting all public wealth to private gain on a plan of legalised seizure”
• “the seizure of the fertile soil and its conversion to private gain.”
• Soddy, the 1921 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, was an important forerunner of ecological economics.
• labor as the father of wealth, the earth as the mother.
• nature was part of “the general wealth” of the world.
• wealth consists, let us say, of the enabling requisites of life,
• but, if it is to be had in unlimited abundance, like sunshine or oxygen or water, then it is not any longer wealth in the economic sense
• “the economist, ignorant of the scientific laws of life, has not arrived at any conception of wealth,”
• those who, based on making market exchange the sole criterion of value/wealth, thought that the creation of scarcity with respect to food, fuel, air, etc. made humanity richer.
• Despite the devastating criticisms
• social/public wealth, excluding the whole question of social (and natural) cost
• analysis of social costs is carried on not within the main body of value and price theory but as a separate system of so-called welfare economics.
• attempts within the system to expand private riches by exploiting these scarcities, such as the worldwide drive to privatize water, are ever-present.
• leading ecological economist Herman Daly
• The ecological contradictions of received economics are most evident in its inability to respond to the planetary environmental crisis.
• arising from a distorted accounting that measures exchange values but largely excludes use values, i.e., issues of nature and public wealth.
• Agriculture, the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change, accounts for just 3% of national output.
• In this view, the failure of agriculture in the United States would have little impact on the economy as a whole!
• inability to take into account material realities.
• capitalist economy
• global warming under business as usual would have a “negligible” effect on world output.
• Thomas Schelling, winner of the Bank of Sweden’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
• three percent in the United States — of national income.
• If agricultural productivity were drastically reduced by climate change
• the cost of living would rise by one or two percent, and at a time when per capita income will likely have doubled.
• GDP measurements become everything,
• There is no understanding here of production as a system, involving nature (and humanity), outside of national income accounting.
• failing to realize that a decrease by half of agricultural production would necessarily have an extraordinary impact on the price of food!
• oday, with a “tsunami of hunger sweeping the world,” and at least one billion people worldwide lacking secure access to food, these statements of only a decade ago by leading mainstream environmental economists seem criminal in their ignorance.36
• Capitalism’s general orientation with respect to public welfare, as is well known, is a kind of trickle-down economics
• justified by the false promise that some of this affluence will eventually trickle down to those below.
• unrestrained accumulation, the environment will be improved through ever-greater efficiency
• nothing is more dangerous to capitalism as a system than abundance.
• perversely provides new prospects for private profits through the selective commodification of parts of nature (public wealth).
• All of this points to the fact that there is no real feedback mechanism, as commonly supposed, from rising ecological costs to economic crisis, that can be counted on to check capitalism’s destruction of the biospheric conditions of civilization and life itself
• whole new industries and markets aimed at profiting on planetary destruction, such as the waste management industry and carbon trading, are being opened up.
• he growth of natural scarcity is seen as a golden opportunity in which to further privatize the world’s commons.
• UN Commission on Sustainable Development proposed, at a 1998 conference in Paris, that governments should turn to “large multinational corporations” in addressing issues of water scarcity, establishing “open markets” in water rights
• Not only water offers new opportunities for profiting on scarcity. This is also the case with respect to fuel and food
• shift in agriculture from food crops to fuel crops.
• The result has been greater food scarcities, inducing an upward spiral in food prices and the spiking of world hunger.
• Similar issues arise with respect to carbon-trading schemes, ostensibly aimed at promoting profits while reducing carbon emissions.
• the expansion of capital trumps actual public interest in protecting the vital conditions of life.
• ruling-class circles actively work to prevent radical structural change
• any substantial transformation in social-environmental relations would mean
• challenging the treadmill of production itsel

• launching an ecological-cultural revolution.

   
• from the standpoint of capital accumulation, global warming and desertification are blessings in disguise, increasing the prospects of expanding private riches.
• Lauderdale’s question: “What opinion,” he asked, “would be entertained of the understanding of a man, who, as the means of increasing the wealth of…a country should propose to create a scarcity of water, the abundance of which was deservedly considered one of the greatest blessings incident to the community? It is certain, however, that such a projector would, by this means, succeed in increasing the mass of individual riches.”41
• Numerous ecological critics
• new green accounting systems that would include losses of “natural capital
• mportant in bringing out the irrationality of the system, they run into the harsh reality
• national accounts does accurately reflect capitalist realities of the non-valuation/undervaluation of natural agents (including human labor power itself)
• To alter this, it is necessary to transcend the system
• dominant form of valuation
• causing it to profit on the destruction the planet.
• Lauderdale’s devastating critique of the pursuit of private riches at the expense of public wealth earns him a position as one of the great dissident voices in the history of economics.

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• the capitalist class and corporate special interests—that made it difficult, nearly impossible, for civilian government spending as percentage of GDP to rise above the 14 percent ceiling for any length of time.3
• military spending has been subject to periodic huge increases (as well as periodic declines), and has remained the main means of fiscal stimulus of the economy for the past seventy years.
• state spending has nearly doubled as a percentage of civilian government spending over the past fifty years and now stands at 15 percent of the latter.
• this sharp increase in penal state spending has had the effect of crowding out other forms of civilian government spending.
• The recent public statements critical of the prison-industrial complex by Senator Jim Webb are striking, not only for their insight and courage, but for their isolation from virtually all other political commentary
• The United States accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population, and almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
• when it comes to locking up its own people. No thug dictator, no psychopathic madman, anywhere in the world can touch the United States
• Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1,200 percent since 1980.7 Those in prison due to drug possession now account for 53 percent of all federal prisoners, and 20 percent of state prisoners.8
• These offenses were victimless, and nonviolent.
• Neoliberalism, in essence, is capitalism with the gloves off, a political regime where the interests of capital are elevated and the interests of the working class are demonized and demolished.
• o some extent the drug war can be understood as a classic case of the phony moralism that thrives as a distraction in neoliberal times, covering up the real failures of capitalist society
• Studies show that those nations with the highest rates of inequality also tend to have higher rates of incarceration, with the United States representing an extreme on both counts.
• The passage of “three-strikes” legislation in most states in the 1990s constituted a further intensification of this punitive turn, resulting in much higher levels of incarceration.16
• Because privatization of prisons is objectionable to many
• corrections were attacked as grossly inefficient, requiring intervention by the more streamlined private secto
• privatization advocates was that private prisons would save the state as much as 20 percent in cost
• The study added that what savings the private firms did generate came almost entirely through lowering wage costs; i.e., smashing the prison guard union
• the private prison industry has tremendous incentive to increase the use of prison labor in the marketplace,
• Already thirty-seven states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private firm
• a significant portion of military equipment is produced in federal prisons.
• Much like the military sector and the health insurance sector, the prison-industrial complex, both private and public, has become a major industry, with the standard accoutrements of conventions, trade shows, and Wall Street investment analysts devoted to it. I
• a tremendously powerful lobbying force in Washington
• Fully three-quarters of all prisoners locked up for drug-related charges are African-American.
• More and more people may conclude that the United States cannot afford its prison-industrial complex any more than its military-industrial complex, given pressing social needs.

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• Maslow studied healthy people
• The organism has one sovereign drive, that of self-actualization
• potential, if allowed to unfold by an appropriate environment, will produce a healthy, integrated personality.
• Psychopathology generally results from the denial, frustration or twisting of our essential nature.
• SA persons are unthreatened, unfrightened by the unknown.
• lack of crippling guilt or shame,
• Accept themselves, others and the natural world the way they are.
• enjoy themselves without regret or apology, they have no unnecessary inhibitions.
• autonomous,
• Spontaneous in their inner life, thoughts and impulses,
• unhampered by convention.
• Focus on problems outside themselves, other centered
• They have a mission in life requiring much energy, their mission is their reason for existence.
• characterized by a lack of worry, and are devoted to duty. 
• unflappable, retain dignity amid confusion and personal misfortunes, objective. They are self starters, responsible for themselves, own their behavior.
• Alone but not lonely,
• SA's rely on inner self for satisfaction
• independent from love and respect.
• Have a fresh rather than stereotyped appreciation of people and things.
• "Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before,
• he conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened,

• Effects of peak experiences: 

   
  •  The removal of neurotic symptoms
    
  •  A tendency to view oneself in a more healthy way
    
  •  Change in one's view of other people and of one's relations with them
    
  •  Change in one's view of the world
    
  •  The release of creativity, spontaneity and expressiveness
    
  •  A tendency to remember the experience and to try to duplicate it
    
  •  A tendency to view life in general as more worthwhile.
• affection for mankind
• older-brother attitude.
• friendliness shown to everyone.
• Profound, intimate relationships with few
• Able to learn from anyone,
• Friendly with anyone
• They make the most tedious task an enjoyable game
• They have their own inner moral standards (appearing amoral to others).
• Jokes are teaching metaphors
• Inner detachment from culture,
• Impatient with self when stuck
• Painfully aware of own imperfections,
• joyfully aware of own growth p
• work becomes play
• opposite forces no longer felt as a conflict
• self exploration and action.
• Experience things fully,
• safety (out of fear and need for defense)
• Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
• and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.
• Try to shut out the external clues
• should
• When in doubt, be honest.
• Be prepared to be unpopular.
• Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defenses--and then finding the courage to give them up.

• n other words, man has an internal, natural, drive to become the best possible person he can be. 

  "...he has within him a pressure toward unity of personality, toward spontaneous expressiveness, toward full individuality and identity, toward seeing the truth rather than being blind, toward being creative, toward being good, and a lot else. That is, the human being is so constructed that he presses toward what most people would call good values, toward serenity, kindness, courage, honesty, love, unselfishness, and goodness." (Maslow, 1968, p. 155.)
• The value- illnesses which result from valuelessness are called variously anhedonia, anomie, apathy, amorality, hopelessness, cynicism, etc., and can become somatic illness as well.
• "Pure spontaneity consists of free, uninhibited uncontrolled, trusting, unpremeditated expression of the self,
• Control, will, caution, self-criticism, measure, deliberateness are the brakes upon this expression
• to use and value their primary processes instead of fearing them, to accept their impulses instead of always controlling them, to be able to regress voluntarily without fear, turns out to be one of the main conditions of creativity."
• "This development toward the concept of a healthy unconscious and of a healthy irrationality, sharpens our awareness of the limitations of purely abstract thinking, of verbal thinking and of analytic thinking.
• "An important existential problem is posed by the fact that self-actualizing persons (and all people in their peak- experiences) occasionally live out-of-time and out-of-the- world (atemporal and aspatial) even though mostly they must live in the outer world. Living in the inner psychic world (which is ruled by psychic laws and not by the laws of outer-reality), i.e., the world of experience, of emotion, of wishes and fears and hopes, of love of poetry, art and fantasy, is different from living in and adapting to the non-psychic reality which runs by laws he never made and which are not essential to his nature even though he has to live by them. (He could, after all, live in other kinds of worlds, as any science fiction fan knows.) The person who is not afraid of this inner, psychic world, can enjoy it to such an extent that it may be called Heaven by contrast with the more effortful, fatiguing, externally responsible world of "reality," of striving and coping, of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood. This is true even though the healthier person can also adapt more easily and enjoyably to the "real" world, and has better "reality testing," i.e., doesn't confuse it with his inner psychic world." (p. 213)
• to freely respond to internal and external events (values), to be himself at all costs.

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• was a young boy
• n the dawning of the "Golden Age of Greece." 
• acted on his belief that the masses, and not just property-owning aristocrats, deserved liberty.
• history's first liberal politician-
• used the public treasury to promote the arts.
• unprecedented building program
• ut also to ensure full employment and provide opportunities for wealth creation among the unpropertied class. 
• in this bastion of liberalism and democracy
• ocrates was not a democrat or an egalitarian.  To him, the people should not be self-governing; they were like a herd of sheep that needed the direction of a wise shepherd
• He denied that citizens had basic virtue necessary to nurture a good society,
• nstead equating virtue with a knowledge unattainable by ordinary people. 
• is unpopular views, expressed disdainfully and with an air of condescension, provoked
• comic headmaster of a "thinkery" (or "thoughtery").  He is portrayed "stalking the streets" of Athens barefoot,  "rolling his eyes" at remarks he found unintelligent, and "gazing up" at the clouds.
• poverty-stricken windbag Socrates who contemplates everything in the world but does not know where his next meal is coming from.
• labels a gang of pro-Sparta aristocratic youths as "Socratified."
• Sparta--the model of a closed society
• stirred additional resentment by offering arguments against the collective, ritualistic view of religion shared by most Athenians
• Socrates provocatively tells his jury that he is a hero
• he contends, he has battled for decades to save the souls of Athenians--pointing them in the direction of an examined, ethical life
• He tells the crowd that his conviction resulted from his unwillingness to "address you as you would have liked me to do."
• the first martyr for free speech. 
• as Jesus needed the cross to

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• Imaginative, thoughtful and  creative individuals have always had a hard time
• Our world has never welcomed the original, the  challenging,
• The  iconoclast has never been a welcome figure in any age.
• * Confucius,
• Socrates
• Dante, the Italian poet,
• Spinoza
• insisted on  maintaining his intellectual independence. He and his work were denounced as  `forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the devil'.
• Galileo,
• to support Copernicus,
• had the temerity to claim that the planets revolved around the  sun.
• Ignaz Semmelweiss
• ecognised that puerperal fever was caused by doctors' dirty habits was  ostracised by the medical profession for daring to criticise practical  procedures.
  
• obstetrician
• Henry David Thoreau, surely the kindest,  wisest philosopher who has ever lived, was imprisoned for sticking to his  ideals.
• 
  Original thinkers do not go down well.
• But although  all these individuals were persecuted for their beliefs - and many of them died  for their ideals - they did at least have a chance to develop, to learn, to  speak out, to teach, to write, to publish and to attempt to change  things
• oday, things are worse than they have ever been for the  iconoclast.
  
  Incompetence and mediocrity thrive and are now subsidised,  supported and encouraged by our increasingly bureaucratic and intrusive society.  
  
  Schoolteachers and social workers encourage mediocrity because they  themselves are mediocre. Talent frightens them witless.
  
• bureaucrats  and administrators incompetence and mediocrity are esteemed virtues
• evere the banal and worship the bland
• they sneer at  and scorn the unusual or the eccentric.
• 
  Politicians are frightened of  anything new or challenging. They reject the innovative, the creative and the  imaginative in favour of the accustomed, the comfortable and the  ordinar
• mediocrity and incompetence  are regarded as essential virtues; the necessary building blocks for personal  and professional success
• Creativity will be  regarded as politically incorrect and therefore unacceptable. Originality will  be suffocated.
• 
  The future will lie firmly in  the hands of the mediocre and the incompetent.

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• In his view it was his duty to stand for the law and for justice despite the wishes of the Assembly
• To foil the will of the Assembly doesn't sound very democratic, but then the will of the Assembly was often arbitrary and vicious
• the Assembly discredited the very idea of democracy for centuries.
• ames Madison comments on the problem of democracy to be overcome:
• a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens,
• can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.
• there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property;
• Socrates himself was among the original type of "obnoxious individual" against whom a pure democracy may turn.
• danger of the tyranny of the majority
• If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach?
• I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them.
• "the majority must rule,
• re the majority of a country to rule without restraint, it is probable as much injustice and oppression would follow, as are found under the dominion of one.
• the rule of law does not mean that any actions can be approved or condemned just because some legislative authority happens to pass a law about them. Pericles's reference to "unwritten laws"
• hat the fundamental basis of positive law is the unwritten natural law dictated by reason itself (ultimately by God, as far as they were concerned), and that the fundamental protection of the individual is not in some positive grant of rights by legislative authority but in the natural rights which are part of the unwritten natural law
• The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
• The "others" are clearly natural rights
• Yet it is now common for people, even lawyers and judges, to "deny or disparage" certain rights
• ustified by Martin Luther King by quoting St. Augustine that, "An unjust law is no law at all.
• But how, one might ask, can people just go around judging for themselves whether a law is just or not? The answer is that they have to, and that is the principle of freedom of conscience
• Whether it is properly understood or not, much talk about democracy holds the rule of law in contempt, either because it contravenes the Will of the People or because it also denies power to those who would rule according to Jean Jacques Rousseau's idea of the "General Will": The "General Will" of the people is what they would want if they knew what was best for themselves
• The rule of law is the shield of every honest person against those who want to claim superior power out of their supposed superior understanding
• That was the principle of the Constitution,
• eroded by the natural power-seeking of government, the craven accommodations of the courts, and the constant quest of those pursuing their own interests through the authority, agency, and coercion of government
• Thus Winston Churchill said that democracy is the "worst form of government," just better than all the others
• That is why the federal government, with zero authority from the enumerated powers of the Constitution (violating the Tenth Amendment), can seize your house (violating the Eighth Amendment) and put you in jail just for growing a marijuana plant in your yard--because, I suppose, it is bad for you
• justified, not by the principles of Liberal Democracy, but by the principles of Social Democracy: which abridges freedom for the purpose of the "social good," as that is determined, naturally, through political power and the majority.

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