Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The Country Class and the Ruling Class Face Off

Rush Limbaugh assigned his students a reading from The American Spectator: America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution:
Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain.
Wow. It really is required reading, but set aside some time—it's long. I may have more to say about it in a future post, but for now I want to take exception with the notion that the country class (non-elites) is unorganized. My perception in St. Louis, Missouri, is that we are not nationally organized but we are locally and often vertically organized which is to say that the country class is not well integrated.

I also thought of a couple of related articles. Here's my well worn copy of the Practical Rules of Bureaucracy, and equally interesting is the Fiction and Tyranny of "Administrative Law" which closes with this helpful, if revolutionary, list of principles:
In light of this, the following legal principles should be adopted:

  1. No actions by government agents or agencies are free of the restrictions imposed by the Fourth Amendment or other articles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
  2. There are no legal actions apart from the criminal and the civil, with the full Constitutional protections established for each.
  3. There can be no courts or judicial proceedings apart from duly constituted components of the Independent Judiciary, wherein the protections of Trial by Jury cannot be suspended or restricted.
  4. Legislative bodies cannot delegate the power of making laws, or confer upon anyone the power of making any rule or regulation that has the force of law.
  5. The only Constitutional exceptions to these rules concern the military, military discipline, military justice, and (in times of war, invasion, or rebellion) martial law.

These principles will not prevent any further bad laws or tyrannical practices, but they will defuse the structural tyranny that has been created through "administrative law," its "inquisitors," its regulatory extra-constitutional legislators, and its fraudulent "courts." Further restrictions would concern the use of civil law for government actions, treated elsewhere.

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