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Socialism, Minority Groups, and Personal Liberties | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2023

It would even be expected that socialist regimes are opposed to the minority groups listed above. There is a very low cost for bureaucrats to prohibit the minority groups from continuing unhampered in their daily activities and a potentially high cost of inaction. If they do nothing, a problematic statistic might be found, and that would not be good for the bureaucrat. When the lives of people are owned by the state, people can be disposed of however the bureaucrat desires.

https://mises.org/wire/socialism-minority-groups-and-personal-liberties

Benjamin Seevers

Socialists have managed to acquire the loyalty of a coalition of disparate groups by championing the principle of personal liberty. Especially in the United States, many women, disabled, gay people, transgender people, racial and ethnic minorities, and immigrants are among the proud supporters of the socialist cause, foolishly believing that capitalism or the free market is antithetical to their livelihood or lifestyles.

They could not be more wrong. Unfortunately, under socialism, people are not self-owners; they belong to the state.

The state owns everyone’s bodies under socialism. No example is more extreme than the gulags of the Soviet Union, where the state sent millions to forced-labor camps in which about 1.6 million died. The individual was merely a producer good in the state’s grand schemes. In current and former socialist countries, the minority groups that support socialism experienced this as well.

For example, in Dr. Paul Kengor’s book, Takedown, he retells the Bolsheviks’ history concerning the most cherished of modern women’s rights: abortion, or the right to choose. The Bolsheviks did legalize abortion once taking power (at that point, it helped wither away the family), but Joseph Stalin, under the fear of depopulation, outlawed abortion in 1936.

This ban continued until Stalin died and Nikita Khruschev’s more progressive administration revoked it in 1955. On the flip side, Fidel Castro’s socialist regime forced abortions as a means for cutting back on risky pregnancies. Additionally, through China’s one-child policy, many of the state’s abortions are compelled in what Kengor describes as “one of the most severe infringements on family life ever inflicted by a government on its people.”

Despite the right to choose being supported by feminists of socialist countries, it is among many of the rights that go by the wayside. Any instance of women being granted the right to choose merely means that the natural rate of abortion was aligned with the goals of the state, or the rates were tolerable.

Convenience, not principle, becomes the criterion for rights. Births become a statistic to the socialist tsar. Whenever births exceed what the directors believe to be the optimal level of births, abortion is allowed or even forced; if births are below what is desired, then abortion is prohibited. There is no room for the rational calculation of individuals in family planning. The socialist woman is not ultimately the owner of her body—the state is, and it exercises that power arbitrarily and totally.

Antifeminist abortion regulations bleed into “ableism” as well. Prior to China’s ending its one-child policy, prenatal screening was successfully used to detect children with Down syndrome so that they may be terminated. This may not immediately seem like socialist management. However, given that families would be less willing to bring a child into the world if it is disabled in some way, parents would maximize the one-child policy by opting to terminate the pregnancy in favor of a more “desirable” child. It is obvious that the socialist management of women’s bodies is to blame for the desire to terminate disabled children.

Given the prevalence of abortion, especially compulsory abortion, in socialist countries as well as the attitude against the disabled, mentally or physically disabled children become a burden on the state rather than on individual parents. To the bureaucrat, these children are merely a statistic. Ordering an abortion is nothing to them but numbers.

Moving away from the abortion issue, those with unorthodox sexual desires have not had a good time under socialist regimes either. Kengor notes, “the Bolsheviks were rooting out the slightest traces of so-called culture cancers such as prostitution and ‘homosexualism.’” Stalin even criminalized homosexuality in 1934. Castro’s Cuba locked up gays in the name of healthcare. As AIDS spread to the island, Castro imprisoned gays in sanitariums against their will, and Che Guevara personally executed and tortured gays as well.

Again, this is all about the public. You do not own your body under socialist regimes. If you own your body, you can spread diseases, and that is a threat to the “public” health regime. Gays were routinely subjected to this violation of human rights under socialism under unjust pretenses.

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Do We Still Have a Constitution? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 12, 2020

These amendments were ratified to restrain the federal government from infringing upon personal liberties. Since the enactment of the 14th Amendment in 1868, and subsequent litigation, these amendments, for the most part, restrain the states as well. The courts have characterized these protected liberties as fundamental

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/11/andrew-p-napolitano/do-we-still-have-a-constitution/

By Andrew P. Napolitano

I have been taking some heat from friends and colleagues for my steadfast defense of personal liberties and my arguments that the Constitution — when interpreted in accordance with the plain meaning of its words, and informed by history — does not permit the government to infringe upon personal freedoms, no matter the emergency or pandemic. For those who agree with me, worry not. We will persevere. For those who trust the government, worry a lot. You are not in good hands.

The purpose of the Constitution is to establish the government and to limit it. Some of the limitations are written in the Constitution itself. Most of the limitations that pertain to personal freedoms are found in the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments.

These amendments were ratified to restrain the federal government from infringing upon personal liberties. Since the enactment of the 14th Amendment in 1868, and subsequent litigation, these amendments, for the most part, restrain the states as well. The courts have characterized these protected liberties as fundamental. Natural Law Spooner, Lysander Buy New $4.99 (as of 03:45 EDT – Details)

So, the rights to thought, speech, press, assembly, worship, self-defense, privacy, travel, property ownership, interstate commercial activities and fair treatment from government are plainly articulated or rationally inferred in the first eight amendments. The Ninth is a catchall, which declares that the enumeration of rights in the first eight shall not mean that there are no other rights that are fundamental, and the government shall not disparage those other rights. The Tenth reflects that the states have reserved powers to themselves.

The Ninth was especially important to its author, James Madison, because of his view that natural rights — known today as fundamental rights — are integral to each person, and they are too numerous to list. In the next century, the anti-slavery crusader Lysander Spooner would explain it thusly: “A man’s natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, … or by millions, calling themselves a government.”

Natural rights collectively constitute the moral ability and sovereign authority of every human being to make personal choices — free from government interference or government permission.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that government derives all its powers from the consent of the governed. And Madison understood the Ninth Amendment to declare that our personal choices are insulated from government interference so long as their exercise does not impair another’s rights.

From this, it follows that if governments interfere with our personal choices — and we have not consented to their power to interfere — the interference is invalid, unlawful and, because our personal choices are essentially protected from governmental interference by the Bill of Rights, unconstitutional.

Now, back to the present-day restraints during this pandemic.

The current interferences with the exercise of rights protected by the Bill of Rights devolve around travel, assembly, interstate commercial activities and the exercise of religious beliefs. These infringements have all come from state governors who claim the power to do so, and they raise three profound constitutional issues.

The first is: Do governors have inherent power in an emergency to craft regulations that carry the force of law? The answer is no. The Guarantee Clause of the Constitution mandates a republican (lowercase “r”) form of government in the states. That means the separation of powers into three branches, each with a distinct function that cannot constitutionally be performed by either of the other two. Since only a representative legislature can write laws that carry criminal penalties and incur the use of force, the governor of a state cannot constitutionally write laws.

The second constitutional issue is: Can state legislatures delegate away to governors their law-making powers? Again, the answer is no because the separation of powers prevents one branch of government from ceding to another branch its core powers. The separation was crafted not to preserve the integrity of each branch but to assure the preservation of personal liberty by preventing the accumulation of too much power in any one branch.

We are not talking about a state legislature delegating to a board of medical examiners in the executive branch the power to license physicians. We are talking about delegating away a core power — the authority to create crimes and craft punishments. Such a delegation would be an egregious violation of the Guarantee Clause. Suicide Pact: The Radi… Napolitano, Andrew P. Best Price: $0.25 Buy New $2.84 (as of 04:15 EST – Details)

The third constitutional issue is: Can a state legislature enact laws that interfere with personal liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, prescribe punishments for violations of those laws and authorize governors to use force to compel compliance? Again, the answer is no because all government in America is subordinate to the natural rights articulated in the Bill of Rights and embraced in the Ninth Amendment.

We should rejoice that there is resistance to gubernatorial ignorance and arrogance that disregards the Bill of Rights. We need resistance to tyranny in order to stay free. Power unresisted continues to grow and to corrupt. History teaches that most people prefer the illusion of safety to the cacophony of liberty. The only reason we have civil liberties today is because generations of determined minorities — starting with the revolutionaries in the 1770s — have fought for them.

Today, we are governed by dangerous men and women. For they have taken away our ability to make personal choices, and they have used force to compel compliance. In doing that, they have not only violated their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights, they also have committed the criminal acts of nullifying our rights. By using the powers of state governments to do this, they have made themselves candidates for federal criminal prosecutions when saner days return.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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Andrew P. Napolitano [send him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written nine books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit creators.com.

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