Thanks. But the Constitution didn't say a 7/8 majority would be required to impose an income tax; it outright forbade it. The procedure for amending the Constitution doesn't require a 7/8 majority, either, but it's still regarded as pretty stringent. (In 30 years, the LP has never been able to get a 7/8 majority to override the stupid "cult" language of the preamble to the platform.) The Constitution still prohibits involuntary servitude, which is required in filling out tax forms and keeping records. As Libertarians know too well, the government now does all sorts of things forbidden to it expressly by the Constitution. We're back to Edelstein's question: What use is a piece of paper to bind the government? Iceland's "vacuum" lasted almost 400 years, a lot better than we've done.
Only isolation and lack of modern telecommunication technology let that vacuum
last 400 years. Comparing apples to apples, do you really think that an
island nation today, operating with no government, would be able to keep
foreign influence, whether the U.N., al Qaeda, or the United States, from
setting up a puppet government in that vacuum? This isn't a rhetorical
question. Please explain how it would work.
Back to the 7/8 thing... You seem to allow that, while "pretty stringent",
the Constitution does have a path by which it can be amended. Now, if you're
one of the folks who believes that the amendment to impose an income tax was
never properly ratified, then you're right. The Constitution forbids it. But
in that case, the level of stringency for amendments is not at fault. If,
however, you believe that the amendment was properly ratified, then the
argument that the Constitution outright forbade an income tax falls away.
The real problem, as I stated in my first post to this thread, is either the
ignorance of the populace about how the system is supposed to work or with the
Judiciary not being as powerful as its legislative and executive counterparts.
Either way, the problem is not with the idea of a constitution, it's with OUR
PARTICULAR Constitution. Ignorance of the voters means that politicians can
pass laws that are clearly unconstitutional, but since most people haven't a
clue that the Constitution trumps laws passed by simple majority, and the
Judiciary is weak, the politicians get away with it. So, that's why I propose
starting from scratch with a new Constitution (thus wiping out all the
thousands of unnecessary laws and resetting all our basic rights as they were
when the current Constitution was written), then forming a government based on
the rule of supermajorities, not simple majorities, so that even the ignorant
masses can't be fooled into thinking that political power grabs are
legitimate.
If human beings are so dumb that they still don't "get it" when we move to a
system of supermajorities, then there's no way they would be able to handle
such an enlightened trust-based system as anarcho-libertarianism, and we're
all doomed anyway. But I'd like to give my idea a try first.
Michael,
In 1995, Iceland had only 300,000 people (I don't think it's much more than that today, certainly less than a million). I don't know how many people lived there in medieval times, but I doubt it was even half that number. In other words, less than a quarter the population of San Francisco. We're talking the equivalent of a small city or a large town here — nothing on the scale of the United States.
Any experimental social system, whether pure anarchy or pure communism, is probably going to be more workable on a small level. So I don't think the fact that a stable anarchy apparently existed there in an agricultural/hunting & gathering society for 400 years is an achievement that should give us a great deal of confidence in its applicability to large, modern nation-states.
We all agree that the Constitution is being generally violated. This doesn't prove that limited government can't work, any more than the eventual collapse of Iceland's system proves that anarchy can't work. The question we face is how can we set up a stable and long-lasting system, or systems that will maximize the individual liberty of 6 billion people?
Yours in liberty,
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