Obama, the Liar-In-Chief

[Jim in CT]

Originally Posted by detbuch

You don't have the inalienable right to bring a shampoo bottle on a plane because the plane is not your property. Supposedly, the plane belongs to the airline company, and it has a right to say what you can bring onto its planes. That is the company's inalienable right to its property. It acts constitutionally when, on its uncoerced volition, it prohibits the shampoo bottle. When, however, it is coerced to do so by the government, the government, in effect, owns that piece of its property, and is denying, in that respect, its inalienable right and ownership of that property. The overreaching government in this case will say that it is acting under the now ubiqitous commerce clause. Originalists would say that the commerce clause was intended to promote commercial cooperation among the States, but not a tool for the central government to own commerce. The clause was not intended to allow the central government to become a commercial entity, nor one which would usurp the commercial powers of private entities. A progressive would say that the Constitution has evolved, and, indeed, the Federal Government does have, as a necessity, unlimited powers under various clauses.

Property and the right to it is precisely one of the original principles that progressives intend to remake. The progressive shift of property is from the individual, as originally intended, to the public, which, of course, is expressed in, and by, the government. For the public good, individual ownership of property must be limited to "reasonable" and "fair" or "equitable" bounds. Property was orignally one of the main tenets of the Founders Declaration of Independence. The pursuit of happiness was a more generalized version of the pursuit and ownership of property.

And this attack on property, and inalienable rights, started down, as JohnnyD says, the rabbit hole of a totalitarian like government long before Bush. And it is parroted as a benevolent exercise by various speeches of Obama, such as his you-didn't-build-it speech. It is government, directly, or through its regulatory directions of the people, that did it. We build publicly more and more, and own as individuals, less and less, through the regulatory schemes of a benevolent gvt. that directs our efforts toward the public good, not the selfish private.

"That is the company's inalienable right to its property..."

The airline doesn't own the space above my house where it flies the plane. Therefore, I have no problem with the feds telling airlines that they have to take precautions before they take to the skies. If an airline doesn't ant to put security measures into place, that endangers all of us.

"Property and the right to it is precisely one of the original principles that progressives intend to remake."

Agreed 100%. I just don't feel like the post 09/11 security measures have reduced my freedoms by any measurable amount.

I see a lot of things that scare me out there, most of them economic in nature, because I'm a numbers guy. But not many safety measures that are part of the war on terror, worry me. I only worry that we aren't going far enough in the name of political correctness.