Why Our Nation Is Disintegrating

Market Ticker

America was founded on two basic principles, when you boil it all down:

• Each person has unalienable rights, among them life, liberty (including the freedom to choose where to be, when and how, along with ownership of property necessary and incidental to that choice) and the pursuit (but not guarantee of attainment) of happiness.
   
• Each person has the right to expect that the law shall apply equally to all, so as not to prejudice outcomes for or against any individual (or group) predicated on who they are rather than their conduct.  Conduct, voluntarily engaged in, is a proper reason for people to choose to associate or not with an individual or group.

The rest of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, along with the Amendments that came after it, are about recognizing and protecting those two principles.  They flow from a belief that it is the inherent property of being human that endows one with these rights; no government and no person can grant them, because you cannot grant to another that which you first do not rightfully possess.

Our nation is disintegrating because we refuse to demand that these rights be enforced, backing said demand with whatever we must in order to obtain it.

You’d think that people would figure out that refusing to deal with this issue head-on or granting exceptions to it is an inherently bad thing.  You’d be wrong, in the general case, and that’s most unfortunate.

It is this willingness to allow and even endorse exceptions when one doesn’t like a particular law or outcome that leads to the injustices this nation is flooded with today. 

Let’s list a few:

• It is against the law (Sherman and Clayton Acts, along with Robinson-Patman) to attempt to form monopolies, price-fix and otherwise interfere with free intercourse between buyers and sellers.  These laws were passed as a consequence of various companies forming said monopolies, including for essential goods and services such as energy and food.  Your right as a manufacturer to control pricing and distribution inherently ends with the first sale to someone else, whether that “someone else” is a distributor, retailer or an end consumer.  This is a function of natural property rights — what I own and have paid for I have the right to dispose of as I wish.  It is a rank violation of this principle to prohibit you from buying a product sold in Mexico (or Somalia for that matter) and bringing it back to the United States, provided the product is genuine (not counterfeited.)  Yet it is a felony to do so if that “product” is a drug.  Were I to have colluded with my competitors when I ran an Internet company to set prices I could have been imprisoned, yet this collusion takes place openly and notoriously in the medical field every single day.  But for the protection of the government, threatening to imprison anyone who breaks these monopolies, they could never exist.  You have about 15% of your gross income stolen from you, literally at gunpoint, as a consequence of this one area of commerce and its rank violation of the above fundamental principles alone, yet you not only allow it many of you cheer it on! 
   
• It is against the law to knowingly deliver certain drugs and devices to anyone who is not the actual prescribed individual for same.  This law is an inherent violation of fundamental rights in that it is nobody’s damn business what I put in my own body in the pursuit of an increase in my happiness.  It is a rank violation of this principle to declare a “war on (certain) drugs” and then prosecute people for non-violent acts in fulfillment of same.  But what’s worse is supporting the granting of exceptions only to certain people and not others from the enforcement of this law.  Specifically there are those who support FedEx in their fight against the government — they were indicted for knowingly distributing pharmaceuticals for “Internet pharmacies” that did not require prescriptions.  The test here is not whether FedEx did handle such packages, it is whether they knew and turned a blind eye to it.  If I cannot transport said drug from Mexico (where you need no prescription) to the United States on behalf of someone other than myself (that is, for end use by another person who does not have said prescription) then neither can FedEx!  The law is wrong, but allowing one entity or person to get away with it while others cannot simply screws certain people while others gain an advantage.  The Rule of Law is supposed to prohibit this, yet because certain people don’t like the law or want the drugs themselves they support someone doing a blatantly and known illegal thing.  Sorry, but no.
• Read More Here