Ian: “For this authorization to be effective requires only majority vote. Hence; democracy is the tyranny of the majority.”

So, again, what you’re saying is indeed that other people (when enough of them get together) “authorize” the government to coerce me.

The majority of people “authorize” the government to do all kinds of things not enumerated in the Constitution. An overwhelming majority of people approve, for example, of the Social Security, Medicaid, the Drug War, etc. So how is it, on your theory, that the government has the authority to enforce the terms of the Constitution but not to enforce anything else that 50%+1 of the population happens to favor? If that’s good enough to ordain and establish the Constitution, it’s good enough to ordain and establish any extra-Constitutional program you like. If majority vote legitimately authorizes the Constitution, it can also legitimately overturn absolutely any limits the Constitution tries to impose.

Stephen: RAD — re: slavery — that’s why I used the word currently.

Well, you also used the phrase “has ever seen,” which would seem to suggest that it’s currently the worst seen either now or in the past, but it could be topped by something even worse later. If this is just a matter of miscommunication, though, never mind.

Jake: I just don’t think that a ten year old should be able to go into a business and purchase drugs.

Take it up with the parents or the shopkeep, then, since they’re the ones other than the kid who have a stake in the matter. What’s this got to do with whether or not the government should have the power to regulate or prohibit drug sales ex ante?

Stephen: Disclaimers aside, the War on Drug Users is currently the greatest violation of civil liberties this country has ever seen.

… Chattel slavery?

Nigel: Jake, why regulate it?

Nearly all “legalize and regulate” arguments are more or less explicitly made from fear that a principled stance against drug regulation as such is going to make us look bad, not going to fly with the electorate, etc. Maybe that’s not Jake’s idea, but the appeal to people’s hand-wringing responses isn’t reassuring.

The problem with this sort of argument is that it treats public opinion and people’s reactions to a suggestion like some kind of inert mass that you have to move around, rather than conclusions that can (should) be changed by giving reasons. I think pandering to people’s terror of unregulated markets is a moral and strategic mistake posing as “reasonableness;” better to emphasize the principled

Ian, if you’re claiming that “We the People,” through the medium of the Constitution, authorize the government to act under the powers enumerated in the Constitution, and that the “We” in question is supposed to be each of us, and not just the royal “We” being pushed by some smaller group of people, then I offer myself as empirical evidence that your claim is false. I was never asked whether or not I consent to the terms of the Constitution, or authorize the United States government to act on my behalf under the powers enumerated in it. If I were asked, I would refuse to authorize it. The Constitution does not place effective limits on state power, and explicitly provides for moral crimes that I would not authorize anyone to commit on my behalf (e.g. at least some powers of taxation). So would-be governors aren’t authorized to exercise the powers enumerated in the Constitution by everyone subject to it. I (as well as many others) refuse to give my consent.

You could still claim that even if I refuse to give would-be governors my authorization, it’s still true that most people subject to the Constitution do authorize would-be governors to exercise Constitutional powers, either tacitly or explicitly. This seems to be what you suggest when you mention that not enough people disagree with it enough to sustain a popular revolution as a response to my question.

But that line of argument has two problems. The first is internal: it actually undermines strict Constitutionalism rather than justifying it. After all, most American subjects also tacitly and explicitly authorize the gov’t to exercise all kinds of unenumerated, extra-Constitutional powers. If your argument actually demonstrates the legitimacy of enforcing the written Constitution, then it leaves you with no defense against parallel arguments for enforcing any unwritten prerogative (for welfare, warfare, education, regulation, …) that can claim majoritarian backing.

The second problem has to do with the position of “individual dissenters” (in this case, me). It may be true that you can authorize the government to take authority over you, and in so doing you’ve agreed to the demands it places on you within a limited set of powers (e.g. that it has the rightful authority to take excise taxes from you if you authorize it to act under the terms of the Constitution). But it’s quite another thing to claim that you (or anybody else) can authorize the U.S. government to take authority over me, or to enforce its demands on me. I didn’t authorize it to do that, and your “authorization” means less than nothing when the authority in question is over other people: that’s not yours to give.

Ian C: “Individual dissenters must recognize the requirement for regulations of interpersonal behaviors. Where I draw the line is when the laws begin to regulate individual behaviors.”

I agree that’s where to draw the line; I deny that it has anything in particular to do with the Constitution. The Constitution explicitly enumerates powers that invade the individual behaviors of innocent people (e.g. forcibly extracting taxes on peaceful commerce). And even if the Constitution did strictly limit itself to recognizing people’s rights, and to authorizing the defense of those rights against the invasions of others, it still wouldn’t establish any new obligation of obedience or any special authority for its officers. The obligation to act according to justice already existed without the Constitution, and men in government uniforms have no unique power or authority to defend people’s rights that distinguishes them in prerogatives, status, or authority from us ordinary civilians.

Artus, authorization is something that people give or refuse to give; a dead scrap of paper “authorizes” a policy only in the analogical sense that it can serve as a medium to convey authorization from the people who issue it. So, to return to the question, who authorizes the government to do what it does when it acts within the powers enumerated by the Constitution (by, say, using force to take money in the form of tariffs or excise taxes, as enumerated in Article I Section 8)? Is it you? Ian? Gouverneur Morris? Somebody else?

Artus Register: Even in the rare moments when our government’s actions are within the confines of the Constitution, it isn’t exercising a right, but rather doing something that it is authorized to do.

Authorized by whom?

Dauntless: “You assert that a business owner would be breaking the ‘law’ by not withholding their employee’s taxes. I challenge you to post that law to this message board. Good luck finding it, though.”

Let’s say that tomorrow morning the United States Congress and the several states all pass a Constitutional amendment, stating that Congress has the power to impose an individual income tax, and each individual citizen is legally obliged to pay it. If they did this, would you recognize the authority of Congress to take your money from you by force?

If so, why do you think that the demand is made any less arbitrary just by putting it in writing?

If not, then why does it matter whether the government is working from written law or not? The “law” would be a naked usurpation without any moral excuse, whether or not it was formally written down.

Stephen, I agree that many actually existing corporations reap benefits from the criminalization of immigrants, in part because they can use the threat of La Migra (tacitly or explicitly) to control and exploit immigrant workers. And I’m on record as emphatically agreeing that corporatism or state capitalism needs to be sharply distinguished from the free market, and (therefore) defenders of free enterprise shouldn’t always, or even often, be defending actually existing big business. (See, for example, http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/03/31/anarquistas_por .)

And of course I agree that undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be blamed. (For what? They’re doing nothing wrong.) I just can’t find this argument anywhere in MacIntyre’s piece. All I can find is a single paragraph where he says that certain sorts of Chicano activists who are currently boogey-men of the nativist Right are indeed a problem locally in California, but aren’t as big an influence on federal policy as some seem to claim.

He does say that the corporate class has more effect on immigration policy federally than those Chicano activists do. But I can find anywhere at all that MacIntyre suggests that undocumented immigrants aren’t to blame, or that they shouldn’t be punished. He does have some complaints about the “disaster” of Spanish being spoken in Los Angeles schools, apparently blames Latin American immigrants for Los Angeles’s murder rate, and generally talks about Mexican immigrants in a way virtually indistinguishable from the AFL’s anti-Chinese rhetoric of the 1880s.

He nowhere advocates decriminalizing undocumented immigration, which is the only non-immigrant-blaming policy to take. He nowhere even suggests that the criminalization of immigrants, rather than the immigration itself, is the problem. Instead he repeatedly calls for escalation of the war on immigrants, e.g. by prosecuting banks that dare to write loans to immigrants, or government-subsidized landlords who dare to rent to them.

If you want to make the argument that corporatism is at least partly to blame for the situation, and that the best solution is to stop punishing undocumented immigrants immediately and entirely, then you can and of course you should. My beef is with the claim that MacIntyre’s piece, which is a string of immigrant-blaming, protectionist fallacies, and calls for escalation of government attacks on immigrants, has anything to do with the argument that you seem to want to make.

On domestic issues such as shooting immigrants, as a form of protectionism for U.S. workers’ wages? If that’s the tent, I’ll stand in the rain, thank you.

Corporatism and a free market are indeed different things. But the only way to achieve a free market in labor is the complete decriminalization of immigration, not arresting, confining, exiling, and/or shooting immigrants who haven’t gotten a permission slip from the government, or (as McIntyre wants) arresting banks for loaning money to those immigrants, or employers for giving them jobs.

Incidentally, since when did “responsible immigration” mean producing your papers to the federal government on demand? I don’t notify the government of my whereabouts every time I move. What business is it of theirs?

Andy: “Much of the land in this country is held by government or by government connected corporations. The American people are the rightful owners of this land. Most of the American people (80% or more) do not want this country to be flooded with illegal aliens.”

Just what has this got to do with the debate over actually existing immigration policy? The government doesn’t just claim the authority to exclude or remove undocumented immigrants from government roads or schools. They claim the authority to exclude or remove them from anywhere in the United States, including private property, with or without the consent of the owner, and even to conscript employers to serve as immigration cops with their new hires. Whatever you think about the rightful ownership of government-controlled thoroughfares (and, frankly, I think that key aspects of the theory you suggest are frightfully silly), the government is currently reaching far over the boundaries that even your theory would allow for.