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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: YOU ARE LOSING YOUR FREEDOMS
Message-ID: <309@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-Jan-86 15:57:22 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.309
Posted: Thu Jan 23 15:57:22 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 24-Jan-86 22:43:45 EST
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 51

Will Martin writes:

>So it is inevitable that, as the number of laws
>imposed upon us constantly increase, our freedoms steadily decrease.
>....From before I was born there
>have been steady efforts to decrease the freedom of gun ownership,
>from the National Firearms Act of the 30's through the '68 Gun
>Control Act, plus innumerable local and state laws, each action
>steadily decreasing my freedom. I see the same things happening with
>knives, from the anti-switchblade laws of the 50's to the current
>anti-martial-arts-equipment legislation at local and national levels.

Question for Mr. Martin:  What were the intended purposes of these
laws, or of others that may occur to you which you particularly
dislike?

Dave Kirby writes:

>How about a Constitutional amendment that requires a 90% vote in
>Congress to enact a law, and a 51% vote to repeal it?

Thought experiment:  What would have happened in the US if the
Constitution had contained such a provision from the beginning?  What
bills passed both houses by a nine-tenths majority (or even a
three-fourths majority)?  What would things now be like in the US if
only these bills had been enacted?  Would these same bills have been
passed into law if the nine-tenths provision had been in effect, or
would different ones have passed?  Too bad the Constitution was
drafted by a committee of Founding Fathers rather than technoids from
the net.

  For law in its true notion is not so much the limitation as the
  direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest, and
  prescribes no farther than is for the general good of those under
  that law:  could they be happier without it, the law as an useless
  thing would of itself vanish; and that ill deserves the name of
  confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices.  So
  that, however it may be mistaken, the end of law is, not to abolish
  or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.  For in all the
  states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there
  is no freedom.  For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence
  from others; which cannot be where there is no law:  and is not, as
  we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists.  (For who
  could be free when every other man's humour might domineer over him?)
  But a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions,
  possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those
  laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the
  arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own. --John Locke,
  *Second Treatise of Civil Government*
-- 
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes