Make that, “Each Major Candidate” — sorry Ralph & Bob.
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John McCain, the purportedly honor-drenched maverick, appears — contra my prediction — poised to sell his soul for seventeen pieces of electoral silver.
His supposed “most likely” running mate scored his very own post on this blog two Independence Days ago:
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
–Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
Who’s going to tell us what a civil right is and what’s not? Well, the people will.
–Mitt Romney, June 28, 2006
Regular readers of this blog know that, to me, it (and by “it” I mean everything) boils down to the now all-important war between libertarianism and majoritarianism in this country.
Partisan wars, policy wars, culture wars. They’re all just fronts in the real war, between these two mutually exclusive and irreconcilable worldviews.
Which, on this day of days, should not even be a skirmish.
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For Obama, who used NAFTA to first demonstrate (as he has several times since) that he is as willing as any politician to flip-flop whenever it seems politically expedient, here is a post from Independence Day last year chronicling the ironic lack of freedom in the greatest of freedom’s symbols: the American flag.
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Rank protectionism draped — in a flag — as faux patriotism:
A move is on in state legislatures to ensure that the flags folks will be flying and buying this Independence Day were made on this fruited plain.Minnesota has passed the strongest measure, a new law that goes into effect at year’s end requiring every Old Glory sold in state stores to be domestically produced. Violations are a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and 90 days in jail.
In Arizona, schools and public colleges were required starting July 1 to outfit every classroom from junior high up with a made-in-the-USA flag. Tennessee requires all U.S. flags bought via state contract to be made here, and similar bills are moving forward in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Restrictions on economic liberty — “Made in The U.S.A”!
It’s quite simple really: If a governmental body wants — foolishly — to limit its own purchases (with taxpayer money) to domestically produced goods, then so be it. Such idiotic myopia is beyond the reach of the courts (even though such purchases clearly would not satisfy rational basis review — if a lawsuit could somehow materialize).
But the idea that a private person, with her private wealth, cannot buy a flag, made by a private manufacturer and sold by a private retailer, to display on her private property — all because some moral defective moron in a statehouse feels the activist urge to decide for everyone else how best to be “patriotic” — merely shows, yet again, that “The American Way” is long dead, and that there is little to commemorate today.
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Happy Independence Day!
