“The act of participation would only serve to sanction the process.”

How?

Isn’t it possible to submit to a process imposed on you by others, in order to defend your own safety, without conceding the legitimacy of the process?

Did Frederick Douglass “sanction” slavery when he decided to “buy” himself from his former slavemaster, rather than continually risk being sent back into bondage by any slave-catcher who could get ahold of him?

Kevin, thanks for this post; I think you’re right and that the lesson generalizes to a lot of other revolutions ruined by the later efforts of the self-styled “vanguard.”

On the other hand, it should be recognized that a lot of the acts of “economic warfare” that the Marxoids are using to explain Castro’s power grabs were actually perfectly legitimate. The U.S. government’s withdrawal of state-to-state foreign aid transfers, for example, ought to have been celebrated — the last thing that a revolution needs is the colonial patronage of the U.S. government. Similarly, the big oil companies’ refusal to refine Soviet oil in the refineries they built was (prima facie, at least; I don’t know how they came by those refineries) something they had a perfect right to do. It was stupid of them, to be sure, but that’s a separate issue. The embargo and sustained threats of open war were, of course, completely unjustified, and clearly count as warlike. But these came after, not before, the implementation of state capitalism and the opening wave of nationalization. Castro was baring his fangs of his own initiative, well before the U.S. government was doing anything other than withdrawing from patronage into neutrality (a move which ought to have been welcomed, not retaliated against).

Let’s suppose (contrary to fact, of course) that we lived in a simple majoritarian democracy where every issue was decided by popular referendum. Let’s also suppose that bills of attainder are allowed, and that there’s a referendum up tomorrow on a bill of attainder stating “David is guilty of sedition; he shall be whipped and all his property confiscated.”

Do you think that under these circumstances, you’re still morally obliged not to vote? Or would a “No” vote be a justifiable act of (attempted) self-defense?

Dave:

My opinion is that that these paramedical people give good care when rote memory thinking is all that is needed. Of course many of them develope tremendous skill with practice. A good physician is truly educated on a deep level. Not all people are suitable for this. I would not begrudge a doctor treating patients’ serious complex problems a broad education and deep fund of knowledge just to increase the supply. What a doctor doesn’t know can kill you.

Do you think “lay people” (to use the popular cant) are too stupid to figure out that complicated and dangerous procedures are best performed by a more thoroughly trained doctor? Too foolish to be able to figure out when it’s not really necessary, or not worth it under the circumstances, and when it might be better to see a nurse practitioner, midwife, or some other sort of trained healer who has had training other than the sort you get from a med school? Too childlike to be left alone to make these decisions about risk, cost, and reward for themselves, rather than having the government, at the behest of the Doctors’ Guild, force them to pay to see a doctor rather than someone with less medical training, “for their own good”?

Brian,

Whom do you mean to refer to by “We?”

Whoever that may be, do they “respect” the careful, systematic enforcement of unjust laws? Or only the just ones?

This is an issue of some consequence, after all, since there happen to be an awful lot of unjust laws at the moment. Immigration law among them.

lirelou: Every protest against any government policy brings out its share of moonbats and radicals with old axes to grind.

Are you claiming that carrying a Mexican tricolor in an immigration protest qualifies you as a “moonbat” or “radical” with “old axes to grind”? If so, do you feel the same way about Italian-Americans carrying the Italian tricolor on Columbus Day, or about Irish-Americans carrying the the Irish tricolor in St. Patrick’s Day parades?

lirelou: Immigration needs to be fixed, and the protests will perhaps pressure Congress to get on with it. But no one who has entered this country illegally should be allowed to jump ahead of those who’ve obeyed the law and remained outside pending adjudication of their immigrant visas.

The simple solution to this “problem” is to decriminalize all immigrants immediately without requiring any further paperwork. Then there won’t be any queue to “jump ahead” in.

lirelou: We do need immigrant man (and woman) power, but we must ensure that it is brought in to this country in accordance with the rule of law.

Why?

Gil: I think it is the case that illegals tend to avoid paying income taxes.

All undocumented immigrants pay gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and (either directly, or indirectly through the rent paid to their landlord) property taxes. These, and not personal income taxes, happen to be the primary sources of funding for government road-building, government schools, and the state and local services that immigrants are said to be using.

Not all undocumented immigrants work under the table, either. Many undocumented immigrants also pay personal income taxes and FICA taxes, because they use forged papers to get a job and are processed like a normal employee, with money withheld from their paycheck.

doj: The illegal immigrant has to live somewhere, use public roads and other services, school their kids, etc. When you provide jobs to illegal immigrants, you profit while imposing these costs on other citizens.

How are the costs “imposed” in this case different from the costs “imposed” by hiring anybody who has to use government roads and services to get to your house? How are they different from the costs “imposed” by you personally when you use these government services?

Are you operating on the (false) assumption that only citizens (or perhaps citizens and documented immigrants) pay taxes?

doj: One of the jobs of government is to prevent this sort of behavior at least in the cases where aggregate utility decreases.

The easiest way for them to prevent freeloading on taxpayers is to stop subsidizing schools and roads and other services. Trying to minimize or contain freeloading by taking it out on immigrants who aren’t, after all, responsible for the subsidies is not a solution; it’s just a diversion, and one that happens to harm a lot of innocent people.

Boogieman: The next set of rights, and the ones supposedly in dispute today are the rights granted by the Constitution. These rights are natural rights possessed by all free men [sic]. … Non-citizens, however are given no such guarantee by the Constitution.

Nonsense. I defy you to show me any passage in the Constitution which distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens in delineating the natural rights which the government is bound to respect, or indeed anything identified as a “right” at all, other than voting rights (which are, in any case, arguably better described as one of the “privileges and immunities” of citizens rather than as a right, which are, except for the franchise, invariably ascribed to “the people” or to “persons” rather than to “citizens”). There is absolutely no textual basis for the claim that the restraints on U.S. government power, as expressed in Article I, the first ten Amendments, the Thirteenth Amendment, etc., don’t apply to the government’s powers over non-citizens as well as the government’s powers over citizens.

Boogieman: If they wish to exercise their natural rights, fine. They have no legal basis to appeal to the Constitution for protection of those rights, however.

Even if this were true, it would only serve as an argument against the legitimacy of the Constitution. If the Constitution allowed the U.S. government to violate the natural rights of non-citizens with impunity, then it would be a criminal document, worthy only of the contempt of civilized people.

Boogieman: In addition, natural rights do not include the right to break the law, for either citizens or non-citizens.

“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. … The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’”

Part of what having natural rights means is that there are things that no government has the legitimate authority to do to you. If those sorts of injustices are commanded by a law, then defiance of the unjust law is justified, since laws that are passed without legitimate authority are not binding on anybody.

Of course, you could claim that U.S. immigration law isn’t unjust, and doesn’t violate the natural rights of immigrants. But then you’d just be assuming what it’s incumbent on you to prove. So let’s hear the argument for that, rather than a bunch of pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo about clauses that the Constitution doesn’t actually contain.

From the article:

MOSCOW (AFP) — Tens of thousands of people marched through central Moscow on Monday to celebrate May Day in peaceful demonstrations organized by pro-government trade unions and Communists nostalgic for Soviet times.

About 25,000 trade union members called for a “social state,” holding balloons and flowers, according to police spokesman, Viktor Biryukov, quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency.

Several thousand Communist Party supporters also marched from the Lenin monument on October Square to a bust of Karl Marx near Red Square, carrying red flags and portraits of Stalin, an AFP reporter at the march said.

They may not have the tanks and the commisars available for the parade anymore, but the apparatchiks in the crowd seem to be marching for a return of the tanks and the commisars.

And I think demonstrations organized by “pro-government trade unions” for more bureaucratic patronage may be a good summary of everything that May Day is supposed to be against.